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Currently on Kickstarter, Chaosmos is a cosmic chase played out via board game for the enigmatic Ovoid, a singular item of untold power. Produce the Ovoid card at the end of the game and you’re the winner, but along the way you’ll probably have to search planets, battle your foes with futuristic weaponry, and possibly even reverse time! Each player controls a unique alien race with its own set of powerful special abilities, as well as a hand of Equipment cards. By visiting a planet cards can be exchanged with those on the planet, represented in the game by an envelope. By paying attention to rivals’ interplanetary travels and opponents’ cards (revealed by being the victor in battle), shrewd players will begin to construct an understanding of their opponents’ strategies as well as possible locations of the Ovoid. If the Clue-like sleuthing isn’t enough to whet your appetite, Chaosmos features a 35mm miniature for each of its eight alien races as well as the Chaos Clock dial, which keeps track of game turns and can be reversed or sped up by use of the Temporal Displacer card, which can move the Chaos Clock forward or backward up to 8 turns!

The great news is that Chaosmos has already met its $40,000 goal. I spoke with game designer Joey Vigour of Mirror Box Games the day after the game’s launch, on January 3, when the game had just reached 50% Funded and he revealed a wealth of information about Chaosmos’ development, strategy, and Stretch Goals.

The Development of Chaosmos

(L to R) Danny and Joey Vigour at the 2013 GTS with Chaosmos

CG: Can you describe the process of the decision to Kickstart the game yourselves, because as I know, you had several serious nibbles from some game publishers at the GAMA Trade Show?JV: Yeah, absolutely. We debuted our game at the GAMA Trade Show in March 2013 and our original goal was to meet a bunch of publishers and find out if the game was something that could compete in this current marketplace and it had original mechanics. We were pretty familiar with sort of the classic modern games, but we weren’t really sure if it was a marketable concept because it is pretty different from what’s on the market. We met with seven or eight different publishers at that show. We had lined up several interviews in advance and we met a couple people that let us pitch to them at the show. Three of the meetings went well and we followed up several times and there was some back and forth. One company actually requested that we develop the game with a completely different theme. But ultimately we just decided that this is a personal project so we really wanted to produce the game ourselves and the only aspect of producing the game that we didn’t think we could handle on our own was fundraising and so that’s why we decided to go with Kickstarter.CG: Ok, now what was the theme that they were interested in?JV: It was essentially a joke. I had jokingly said “Oh, and if you don’t like space then we could just make it pirates.” And they thought that was great and they wanted pirates, so instead of Hyperspace – which lets you teleport – they wanted Favorable Winds and you know… so it’s interesting.CG: Yeah, I guess that in many ways it could still work. I don’t know about the countdown clock (Chaos Clock) and would they be chasing Davy’s Jones…?JV: The Chaos Clock was going to be a Kraken. It was an interesting dalliance, but the honest truth is that I’m actually pretty married to the space theme. It’s a very personal theme for me; I love space. It was always conceived to be space. It was inspired by a bunch of different sci-fi books, especially one, Interstellar Pig, that’s a space book. It just seemed totally wrong to publish it with a pasted-on theme because so many mechanics are specifically designed secondarily to the theme and they work so well with the space theme. And so we were really stretching it. Why would you be able to remotely look at an island that was thousands of miles away in the pirate theme? It just wasn’t working; I didn’t like it. There wasn’t really a lot of money on the table anyways, so this was the right decision, to self-publish.

Early Origins of Chaosmos: Joey Vigour’s Childhood and an Interstellar Pig

CG: Right. So you mentioned conceiving the game, what was the original interstellar galactic event that spawned Chaosmos?JV: I guess I would have to go back to my childhood. When I was a kid I designed a bunch of games and one of them was a paper-and-cardboard prototype called Interstellar Pig and it was inspired by a kids’ book [of the same name by William Sleator] that I still like to this day. Very rudimentary game. Roll and move, but the book was just great. Very inspirational. I thought a lot about space and a lot about the idea of flying around and looking for cosmic treasure essentially. So several game designs later, I ended up looking back at that prototype and reimagining it as a modern board game with an action point allowance instead of rolling and moving and a lot of, sort of, unique spins on existing mechanics and then some mechanics that I hadn’t seen before at all. So the initial game design started when I was a kid, but about two years ago, 2012 is when I buckled down and decided I was going to start working on this seriously. And it took about a year of development and then the past year since March has been almost exclusively putting my ducks in a row, building up to January 2, 2014 when we launched.CG: Sure. Now have you read the sequel, Parasite Pig?JV: Haha, I have read Parasite Pig; I think it’s terrible, haha. I’m not a fan of the sequel. I don’t think that it has the spark that the original has.

An Evolving Chaosmos

Concept Artwork for Drusu the Scryer

CG: You mentioned getting your ducks in the row, but what has changed about the actual game since the 2013 GAMA Trade Show in March? Have you changed anything about the game.JV: Absolutely. I guess the primary advancement since that trade show is game balance and cutting down on player downtime, because when you playtest a game with friends and everyone knows all the cards there’s not a lot of analysis-paralysis. But when we actually took it to blind playtesting, we found that players really were uncomfortable making snap decisions that they didn’t fully understand the repercussions of taking certain cards versus other cards. There’s a lot of Race for the Galaxy style choices you have to make where you have a bunch of great cards and you have to discard some of them, or in this case, leave some of them behind on a planet. That just wasn’t working, for players to have to wait their turn, so to speak. So I would say the big change in the past nine months – and it’s a wonderful change – is that you’re now allowed to start your turn as soon as the previous player says he’s finished and he can continue adjusting his hand and the cards in his envelope and make changes between which cards are in his hand and his envelope even when it isn’t his turn. So that is a dramatic change. It allowed us to cut half an hour out of the gameplay and reduce the problems of analysis-paralysis to a negligible degree.

CG: Did any of the alien races change? Do they all still have the same names and the same unique game-breaking abilities?JV: We balanced the races more. That was a major change, because some aliens had amazing powers that were really powerful, but new players couldn’t figure out how to have fun with them, because they are basically really difficult powers. So we just tweaked everything until each alien now has basically a simple power and a more interesting or complex power. And so you can use both powers together in some cases or just the simple power. That was great. The alien names changed a lot in that they have really really long names, but we gave them nice, simple, memorable names. Like Vroon is pretty easy to remember. And Guriwan is a pretty easy to remember planet. Melphyuri-Ghorshi got shortened to Mel-Ghor, so a lot of positive changes in that way. It doesn’t hurt the gameplay at all obviously. Mel-Ghor’s the same planet and it’s called Melphyuri-Ghorshi by the aliens that inhabit it, but the galactic record books shortened the word [laughs] to Mel-Ghor.

CG: Now what’s the deal with this Homesick alien?JV: Oh, the Haghouhen. Yes, so, he’s a very sad alien. He’s the last surviving member of his race. His planet was destroyed by comets and raided by Atturnuk’s race, the Cphovic Empire, so he’s the only one left. And he believes – maybe correctly, maybe incorrectly – that the Ovoid is the secret to reviving his race so he won’t be alone anymore.CG: Ok. He’s kind of emo.JV: Yes, he’s the emo alien.CG: Now did you ever think of leaving some of these blank and then have as pledge levels on Kickstarter that backers actually name some of these things? How important are the names to you?JV: Most of the names were created by my friend William Tombs. He also did most of the art, not the 3D renderings, but the art that the renderings were based on. And he is, in my opinion, like J.R.R. Tolkien. He has a whole world designed and he wants to make a bunch of games set in this universe: miniatures games and roleplaying games and novels. I think it’s great. I don’t think this particular game requires that amount of alien research in order to enjoy it. You can have Alien A, the Green Alien, or the Blue Alien or it could be like Cosmic Encounter where you have very simple alien names like Mirror, but I like a little bit of flavor. I think it is part of the overall experience and narrative as you play the game. When you remember particular sessions later, it’s more fun if you had an epic battle on the toxic planet of Atturnuk and Atturnuk reveals his Respiration Worm which is a worm that lets him breathe on Guriwan. It’s just more fun. It allows you to enjoy the game thematically as well as mechanically.

Player Card for Atturnuk the Brutal with Space for Hyper Tokens and Special Abilities

CG: Now any changes in the technology cards, the Equipment cards?JV: There’s been some changes. One example is, there was a card called Cosmic Fear which forced your opponent to lay down all the combat cards that he was going to play all at once. That way you could decide whether you needed to waste that extra Ion Grenade in order to beat him or if you could save it. But that card ended up being too powerful, so it ended up being changed to a single-use card which goes to the Void after you’re done playing it. It was too powerful, because no card in the game should feel like a must-grab. Everything needed to be equivalent or equivalent in that they’re all good situationally. That was the biggest change, I would say, in the last six months, is weakening that card a little bit.

Mirror Box Games and Chaosmos at BoardGameGeek.Con

“BoardGameGeek.Con is a must-go. It was the greatest con I’ve ever been to.”

CG: I want to return to the must-grabs in a second. Changing topics just a little bit, what was BoardGameGeek.Con like for Mirror Box and what’s it like for the rest of us who have never been there? Tell us about it.JV: BoardGameGeek.Con is a must-go. It was the greatest con I’ve ever been to. It was a convention for gamers; there was all sorts of gaming. I would walk around around and see Tom Vasel playing games with people that he’d just met at the table. I saw Rich Summer from Mad Men playing games. He’d walk by and sit down and he’d start playing a game. And he’s an actor, you know, and they’re not and no one cared. It was just amazing. We had a giant display in the main hall near the Hot Games section so we got a lot of traffic. Over a hundred people signed up to our email list and probably a 120 people played our game so almost everyone who played our game jumped on to our list. That’s a big deal. When you’re going to other conventions, a much smaller percentage of people are interested in backing your game later. We went to the right convention for our game.CG: So at Gen Con, attendees buy tickets to play in events, does BoardGameGeekCon have a similar mechanic or do people just come and if there’s room they play?JV: It’s expensive. It’s 80 or 90 dollars for the con, but you just walk into the board game library and they have every game ever and you check out whatever you want and hopefully you return it in a timely fashion and they don’t have to chase you down. And you play and you just play all day. And you can check out the Hot Games table(s) where all the cool games from Essen are being demoed. There’s a lot of prototypes. There’s a special section for prototypes and then there’s a lot of events, special events, that are going on. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to get outside of my exhibition hall that much, but it was just an amazing experience.CG: Ok, so you definitely want to go again?JV: I will go every year from now on.

CG: Ok. So how many demos and play tests do you think you’ve done now?JV: Well, let me see. I would say it has definitely been, in the last year, we’ve probably played something like 1,000 sessions, because we had three and sometimes four copies of Chaosmos being demoed simultaneously at BGGCon for the entirety of the con. So, yeah, probably 1,000 games and quite a few blind play tests. We’re now testing a 5th-player expansion and we haven’t done our blind play tests for that at all. So that’s our next big hurdle, is to find the time to do blind playtesting with a fifth player.

CG: How many prototypes are there now?JV: In this final version – we changed our board, that’s another change, that’s another thing that changed since the GAMA Trade Show is we reduced the number of stars between the planets – this version, there’s seven copies and they’re all checked out by reviewers right now. And there’s probably twenty prototypes. Then there’s three original prototypes where we 3D-printed the aliens and got them hand-painted. So hopefully we’ll get those all back. We used a company called Sculpteo for the 3D ones. And then all the other copies, as soon as I get those back I’ll probably chuck them because you never want to go back to your old version. The worst thing is when you show up to do a demo and you realize you packed the board from six months ago.

Must-Have Aliens, Equipment Cards, and Strategy

CG: You mentioned must-grabs and so on, is there a particular alien race that everyone seems to envy or want to play?JV: A lot of new players like Atturnuk the Brutal because his miniature features a giant sword. A lot of people choose him. People who like backstory and who actually read the flavor text on the alien character sheets choose the Haghouhen a lot. A lot of people like Clokknid. They like robots for some reason. He’s a series of interlocking robots connected by an artificial intelligence that governs them all. A lot of people like that for reason.CG: Has anyone started talking in a robotic voice for him?JV: We have found that certain players do the voices and they do the voice from the moment they see the art for the character to the moment the game is done. That has been a strange experience. One guy is actually a voiceover artist. He was at our playtest we did just prior to the GAMA Trade Show in early March and he invented a voice for all eight aliens plus some other bonus aliens that we’re tweaking. And he recorded a little intro with all the different aliens. So I think we’re going to release alien profile videos using his various voices for the aliens. That’ll be fun.

CG: The Equipment cards break down into Traps, Bases, Weapons and?JV: So, yes, there are different types of Equipment cards. There’s Advanced Weapons; there’s Primitive Weapons. There are counters to all of the Advanced Weapons. Most of the cards are unique. There’s a 70 card deck and most of them are unique. There are Tactical cards which actually go face up on a planet. It could be face down just like any other card and you could take it into your hand and move it to another planet and come back for it later. But if you set it face up, then when another player lands on that planet, if he doesn’t have the Signal Jammer, he’s going to get trapped and the Trap would banish him back to his home planet and his turn would end. But there’s only three Traps in the game and they’re valuable, but you have to be careful how you use them, because they fill up your hand if you carry them around and then if you Trap a planet that doesn’t end up being important you’ve sort of wasted your time and your Trap. Vaults are interesting because they don’t protect a planet from prying eyes, in that if you land on a planet that’s Vaulted, you can still look at that envelope, but you can’t take anything. It’s a Magnetic Vault. You can’t take anything unless you reveal a Key. So you can hide the Ovoid on Pendra and if I land on Pendra I’ll announce “Ok, there’s a face-up card.” I’ll get to peak inside and see the Ovoid and I’ll know that you left it there and you’ll know that I know that it’s there, but if you hid the key on a different planet, then I’m gonna go on a mini-quest to find the Key, so I can come back and open the Vault. But by then, maybe you’ve figured out another way to get the Ovoid back. So a lot of second-guessing of what other people are doing. And then there’s also Bases that protect the envelopes with the combat cards that you store inside the Base.

CG: So do some players forego playing Bases and Traps and just choose to play with Weapons? Is that viable? Are you able to play the whole game and beat it just choosing Weapons to use or can you be totally defensive and just collect Counters?JV: This is, I think, the element of the game that I’m most proud of. People often ask, “What mechanic are you most proud of?” I think figuring out a way to the balance the game to a degree where we’ve yet to figure out an automatic game-winning strategy, that’s the thing I’m most proud of. Some players collect Weapons and Weapons are important because when you beat somebody in combat you get to look in their hand and take a card so that’s a way of discovering the Ovoid if somebody’s carrying it. If somebody isn’t carrying the Ovoid – if they’ve hidden it somewhere – you could beat them a hundred times and not get the card you need to win. Some players play with Vaults, they love setting Vaults up and deactivating the Vaults and moving them to other planets and then reactivating them. Some players like sticking all the Weapons they can get inside of their Base and then finding more Weapons and teleporting those Weapons into the Base using Hypertube cards. I personally think that the reason the game is so balanced in regard to strategies is the psychological element is more powerful than the mechanical element of which cards you have, because if I think that you are setting the Ovoid inside a Vault on Guriwan and I spend the game looking for something to break in there and steal it, and you’ve actually outsmarted me and you moved it earlier to a different planet that I hadn’t even thought of, then you’re going to win and I’m going to lose even though I might have all the Weapons in the world, and a Key, and a Signal Jammer that breaks Traps. It’s all about the Ovoid. It builds, and builds, and builds over the course of the game and it comes down to who has the Ovoid. So yeah, it’s a battle of wits.

Chaosmos Stretch Goals: Player Shields, Components, and Miniatures

CG: So we’ll be talking about some other stretch goals in a bit, but what will players do if the Player Shields remain locked? What’s the role of the Player Shields?JV: When you’re opening a planet, first of all, it’s important that no one knows what cards are there. If you’re not sitting far enough away from the person to your left and right, there’s a chance if you’re not accessing your envelope under the table or off to the side that they could accidentally catch a glimpse of some of the cards. Anytime that you’re manipulating cards face up as well as face down, there’s the chance of accidentally revealing information and information is key in this game. Part of the concept of the Shields is it’s more just a matter of do players want them? Is it something that they want to tell their friends to back the project so that we can get to that level? I don’t think that it’s a critical game element; we’ve played the game for two years now without playing with Player Shields. We did make some recently as a test and it seemed like people were responding to it. It adds an element of three-dimensionality to the tabletop. Because you can look across the table and see what race I am and what my special abilities are quicker than just looking at my alien sheet.

CG: Ok. Onto some stretch goal stuff. Your first few stretch goals, can you explain the differences in components, between the 1.5 millimeter tokens and the 2 millimeter tokens?JV: Sure, so, all of the Hyper Tokens are cardboard chits. So thickening them to two millimeters would be great because it makes them easier to pick up and it has some weight to it. I think it’ll be fun to thicken basically all of the cardboard in the game. In addition, there’s Landing Markers. Every time you land on a planet you’re going to be leaving your flag behind to remind people that you were there last. So all these 56 markers in the game – rather than just putting a thin sliver of a flag on a planet, it’ll be fun to have a nice, meatier meeple to leave behind.CG: What can you think of that’s a comparable 2mm product?JV: I don’t know the exact size of other games. Fantasy Flight uses a lot of 2mm cardboard in their expensive titles. Descent, Twilight Imperium. The flags in Twilight Imperium are great. So we want to upgrade components to that. Right now we’re working with Panda GM. In my opinion they make the best components in the industry. They make Merchants and Marauders and they make Eclipse: great component quality.

CG: So also for component quality, which is your second Stretch Goal, for the playing cards you have this upgrade from greycore to bluecore. Can you explain that to us?JV: When I was a kid I had Magic cards that went through the washing machine and then dryer and you could still read them and play with them and those are bluecore. It’s a level of cardstock where there’s actually a core inside the paper which keeps it sturdy to a degree where you can play with the cards for years and years and years and they’re still playable, they’re still readable, they’re still in good quality. A lot of games, especially Kickstarter games, come out with greycore. It’s just a significantly lower quality paper. So greycore is still playable, it’s still great, but if you’re going to love a game and be proud to own it, you’re going to want to have bluecore because that’s the Magic: The Gathering quality.

The Chaosmos Miniatures

35mm 3D Plastic Sculpt of Atturnuk the Brutal

CG: Also, I’m always a fan of miniatures in board games, but how important are the minis to Chaosmos?JV: I think it comes down to the thematic experience. It comes down to when you’re a kid and you play with miniatures it’s something that’s meaningful. I don’t remember any of the hex and counter games that I played when I was a kid. I mean I owned Starship Troopers and Diplomacy and I don’t really remember those games, but I remember the games that had miniatures, even the bad games with miniatures, so it comes down to does the game inspire the thematic in us? So I guess you could play the game with little pawns or cardboard player stands, but to me, it’s a miniatures game. It was always intended to be a miniatures game even when I was a kid. My brother, who is the primary sculptor in the family, would make little Play-Doh creations that we would put in the oven and we would play with those miniatures, so to me it really comes down to theme. The game is a thematic experience and my favorite thematic games all have miniatures.CG: And why the 35mm scale?JV: This is not a 4X game and you’re not going to be moving large armies around. You have a detailed, single alien that you are playing the role of. Warhammer 40K would use 28mm for the size of a figurine, but 35mm it gives it enough attention to detail so you can easily see that the blue alien has a bunch of extra arms and his special ability allows him to hold extra cards and Vroon the Adventurer has a jetpack and he can move an extra movement action. Each alien’s miniature relates to their special ability in a way that even kids who play the game, instantly remember what they’re special ability is because of the miniature. So the 35mm, the larger size miniature, I think, adds to the fun.

CG: If we can imagine, right now you’re sitting at 50 percent funded. Let’s say you were at 3 percent. Would you ever ditch the miniatures if you needed to?JV: Well Kickstarter is an interesting thing because when somebody backs your project, they’re believing in you and you can’t undermine them later and say, “Well, we’re keeping your money, but we’re not going to give you what you backed for.”CG: Right. So you’re saying that maybe that’s why they backed you in the first place, because they want the miniatures?JV: I think it depends on the backer. I think the family and friends who backed the project really probably don’t care about what they get in the end. I think the important thing is keeping our word. If our Kickstarter was a disaster but we could maybe figure out a way to make it work, I think you can always relaunch a project, but I had total faith that the project was complete and the miniatures were a critical component of that and as long as we’re honest with people about why we love miniatures and the component quality of the final product… I think everybody who’s backed us, loves the miniatures. We haven’t had anybody really say that they wish they could have the game without miniatures.

CG: Yeah, don’t you have Kemet behind you in your video?JV: Yeah, probably! I love Kemet. I just played Cyclades recently as well and those have awesome miniatures. To me, I would rather play either of those games over any hex encounter game even if it had superior mechanics. It just excites my mind for whatever reason!CG: Right, I share that with you. It’s also exciting to see the miniatures in this. Of course, you also have Twilight Imperium back behind you and you must love those figures and those ships too.JV: I love Twilight Imperium. I play it more than anyone I know on the internet. We played six or seven times last year. My goal is to play at least six times again in 2014 and I think I worked it out that if I play at least six times in 2014, it’s one fifth of one percent of all my free time.

Hyper Tokens, Strategic Advice, and Chaosmos’ Dice

CG: Is the number of Hyper Tokens you have public knowledge or would you shield that as well?JV: No, that’s public knowledge and you only have three and you don’t get them again. So you wouldn’t be able to hide it even if you wanted to. Hyper Tokens are a very valuable resource. It’s sort of like when you’re out of other options and you’re like, “I got to get to that planet before he discovers my entire cache of weapons or he gets the Ovoid,” or something like that, then you can expend the Hyper Token. But it’s generally really dangerous to do that, because when you use one, it’s such a big deal. It’s an immediate red flag. So this is another way to deduce what’s going on in the game and why it’s not a complete fog of war, because when you Hyper Token over somewhere, you’re probably not bluffing that there’s something good over there. You might be; there might be an amazing, clever reason that you’re bluffing. Generally speaking it’s a red flag that something awesome is going down on that side of the map.

CG: So you can just discover right at the beginning of the game that you have the Ovoid, right?JV: Absolutely. You might start the game with the Ovoid, but it doesn’t necessarily give you an advantage. In fact, in many ways it gives you a disadvantage. If you carry it with you, it just fills up your hand, it’s a completely useless card until the last turn. Not to mention the fact that if someone suspects that you have it, they are going to come after you in such an aggressive way, it will be hard for you to gather items on planets because there will be people trailing behind you. So having the Ovoid… I don’t think it’s an advantage at all in the early part of the game. In the mid-part of the game, yeah, it’s nice to know where the Ovoid is, but I personally don’t carry it with me because it’s just too dangerous. They’re so many super-powerful weapons that are only good for one battle – so most of the cards are permanent; they go back to your hand after you use them. But some cards, like there’s Nano Fabricators that duplicate weapons and there’s Ion Grenades that are +3 in combat, but then they’re discarded. So if you really want to, you can probably win any single combat just by using these special cards, but you have to be tactical as to which combat is the one that you really need to win, because losing combat in this game, it really doesn’t matter that much. The other person will take one of your cards. He’ll get stronger and you’ll get a little bit weaker, but then you’ll land on a planet and you fill up your hand again and move on. It’s not a big deal. But if he takes the Ovoid from you because he won a battle, that would be a critical battle.

CG: What’s the Ovoid on the dice mean?JV: So, it’s actually a Mirror. The Mirror mirrors the other die. If you roll a 3 and a Mirror, then that’s a 6. If you roll a 5 and a Mirror, that’s a 10. If you roll two Mirrors, then that’s Infinity and you would instantly win that battle.CG: Oh wow. But do you get into Infinity +3 versus Infinity?JV: No. Somebody asked me that. I don’t think that it’s ever happened. Maybe it’s happened once. But if you both roll Infinity then both players are immediately banished back to their home planets and their turn ends. I was thinking about this because I saw the movie The Avengers and at one point Thor’s hammer strikes Captain America’s shield and bad things happen. And I thought that was a pretty funny moment, so that’s what happens when both players roll Infinity.

CG: Ok. Alright. Good luck with Kickstarter!JV: Thanks!

All game images and artwork copyright Mirror Box Games and used with permission.

One of the unique opportunities the 2013 Las Vegas Comic Expo afforded its attendees was the opportunity to play a brand new board game, long before the public will get a chance to play it. Las Vegas resident Anthony Carillo brought Big Angry Monsters to the Expo on Saturday and has now brought the game to Kickstarter. Big Angry Monsters will be familiar to any kaiju fans: rival monsters rampage through a city, leaving a trail of devastation in their wake. It’s been done before by Privateer Press’s Monsterpocalypse and this new game’s Big Angry Monsters sure have the look and feel of IELLO’s King of Tokyo characters, but Carillo has managed to combine other gaming mechanics and crisp character designs from Jared Moratis of BeastPop Artworks into one cohesive package. The game is fast, furious, tactical, and fun.

Carillo is seeking to raise $20,000 on Kickstarter to fund the game’s manufacturing from Panda Game Manufacturing in China with a deadline of December 16. For $50.00, US backers get a copy of the standard edition of Big Angry Monsters, plus a Kickstarter exclusive monster, the Pollo Mutado, as well as all stretch goals. Several top-tier pledges allow for the creation of new Monsters designed by backers with $1000 to design an exclusive monster and $1500 for a monster that will ship with every copy of the game.

The Big Angry Rules of Big Angry Monsters

Big Angry Monster Dave the Ape, A Former Smog Technician

As for the rules of the game, at its core, Big Angry Monsters is a game of grid-based combat using six or seven dice to resolve movement, attacks, and defense for the cardboard monster standees. The various kaiju battle in a randomized island city and can only regain health by destroying the surrounding environment. Unlike King of Tokyo, the dice in Big Angry Monsters do not allow a monster to heal, but do allow for a drain energy attack on your opponents’ monsters. And also unlike King of Tokyo, there is only one path to victory: a player wins by knocking out all of the opponents’ monsters.

Along the way though monsters gain experience and can actually level up, which unlocks special Super Moves attacks like Suplexes and Throws. With a Suplex, gained at Level 2, your monster can lift up an opponent’s monster and smash it down onto a neighboring building for additional damage. Attaining Level 3 opens up the option of Throwing a rival monster up to 2 squares away. Additionally when a monster maxes out its level, the player then gets an additional d6 to roll.

The Rulebook Prototype and Art Direction

While the rulebook prototype brought to Las Vegas Comic Expo back in late September had a number of typos, it provided a short selection of solid rules. Carillo turned to Erik Pepper to co-author the game’s introduction and Pepper and Carillo have knocked the ball out of the park. The introduction is light, humorous, and will get any players quickly into the spirit of the game. As for the game’s artwork, while the base monsters were designed by Jared Moratis, Anthony Carillo has turned to another monster creator, Squeedgemonster, to fill in the remainder of the game’s artwork including Power Cards and Location Tiles, as well as the Pollo Mutado Kickstarter Exclusive.

All Big Angry Monsters artwork copyright Anthony Carillo and used with permission.

On May 13 I spoke with Technical Designer Mike Prinke for quite a while about the Heavy Gear Assault video game from Stompy Bot Productions. Based on Dream Pod 9’s Heavy Gear Arena, Heavy Gear Assault is currently on Kickstarter seeking to raise $800,000 by June 29. Mike Prinke is with MekTek Studios, the actual development studio coding and designing the game. We discuss most of the game particulars early on, though we do discuss the possibility of a single player campaign and expanded areas of play near the end of the interview. We also talked about his intriguing Super Smash Quest RPG that helped inspire him to pursue video game design, his education in digital game design, and his theories about choice-driven narratives.

MekTek Game Development

CG: First off, what does a technical designer do?MP: Depending on the studio, the title can vary in meaning, but in the context of this team, basically I do a respectable portion of the gameplay programming for the game. Generally I help direct the team’s efforts in such a way that it’s consistent with the design team’s vision for the game mechanics. Basically I serve as a little bit of a middle man between programmers and designers in order to make sure that the game’s vision stays on track and the programmers don’t go off and just do their own thing. If they need more details on how something works I get it for them and I put it in terms that make sense to programmers, that make sense in terms of implementing the gameplay. So basically to put in layman’s terms, I’m the guy who figures out how to make the game work.

CG: What’s MekTek’s role in this versus what Stompy Bot is doing?MP:MekTek is the developer of the game. It was originally started as a modding group that developed a set of mods for Mechwarrior IV called The Mech Packs, which expanded the game’s number of mechs by about 136, I think. And they also supported it after Microsoft stopped hosting servers. Eventually they wanted to go legit and become a real game developer. Now they’re developing Heavy Gear Assault. Stompy Bot is a publisher that was started up as a sister company to act as the publishing umbrella for Heavy Gear Assault and is looking to expand to encompass other independent productions as well.CG: Now Gear Up 6 has an interview about Heavy Gear Assault with, is it Jack Mamais? [French production.]MP: Jack Mamais [Muh-my-is].CG: So you’re working under him?MP: That is more or less correct. Jack is the fellow who introduced me to this bunch. He got me into the production. I’d been working with him on another project for a couple of months before getting involved with Heavy Gear Assault. And yeah, he introduced me to Vince, and that’s how I got started on the team. He is the Creative Director of Heavy Gear Assault, but Vince McMullin is actually my direct boss. He’s the actual head of MekTek. Jack is the Creative Director of the project though.

CG: Do you telecommute basically? Do you work from your home or do you work in the design studio?MP: I am working from home. I am working from my home in Chicago, Illinois as a matter of fact. Basically the whole team is remote at the moment, simply because we’re just putting together the funding to make this game, let alone actually get a studio that everybody could go to work at each day. Everybody’s working from their own computers from home or – very occasionally – from an office somewhere. I know that there’s a couple of guys in Savannah from SCAD [Savannah College of Art Design].CG: SCAD being the Savannah College of Art and Design, which you’re an alumnus of yourself?MP: Yes, that is correct. But basically what we do is we host daily scrum meetings. Scrum is a development technique that’s used for organizing a software production. More specifically it’s called Agile actually. Scrum is a part, an aspect of Agile.CG: Ok, I thought you were using rugby terms on me. So what’s a scrum for you guys? What’s Agile?MP: Agile is the development method that we use to develop this game. It’s basically the process of organizing a group of developers into a series of what they call sprints. Or what they also refer to as scrums. So there’s the programming team, the art team, the marketing team, and the design team, right?

The Heavy Gear Arena Wildcat Razor LOOKS Agile

Each one of them is running their own scrum and it’s a two-week spring we call it (…usually a two-week sprint). Basically we just collect together what our goals are for those two weeks and say what feature do we want to have online and running by the end of these couple weeks. And we break it down into a list of tasks that goes on our sprint board and people just try and take whatever task they think they can do within the next day or so. They each have a time estimate allocated to them. And each day we have what’s called a sprint meeting and in the sprint meeting we just go around. In the group, there’s a person designated as the scrum master who is hosting the meeting and kind of keeping it organized and on track and you go, “Alright, so, Dan, what’d you do today?” And he’ll explain what he got done in the past day since the last meeting. You just go around in a group like that until everybody’s settled. It takes usually about ten minutes or so and then if anybody’s got any big issues, then they voice what’s going on, what they need help with or what feature has to get done before they can continue and after that’s finished, everybody just gets back to work.

Basically these daily meetings are what’s responsible for making sure that our team can – despite basically being all over the globe, and I’m not kidding about that. When we say that we have one of the most remote teams out there, there’s me in Chicago, a couple of guys down in Savannah, Georgia, there’s Vince reporting out of Canada and that’s where Stompy Bot’s headquarters is, there’s James Taylor in California, there’s Dan Lopez in Spain. We’ve got another fellow named Alexander in Serbia; just loads and loads of people just all over the globe reporting in for this, but because we keep to these daily meetings the team’s energy stays up and we keep motivated.

Heavy Gear Assault’s Development and Gameplay Specifics

CG: Great. So where is Heavy Gear Assault at in terms of development?MP: Very, very early development. I would call it pre-alpha. We had a pre-alpha build that was playable for GDC (Game Developers’ Conference). It was not as much as what you would call an alpha build of the game as a multiplayer damage test, where we were just trying to make sure we had basic multiplayer working and trying to make sure that we had the basic damage system working before we moved on to the real deal of integrating all of our features and smoothing it out and making sure it plays very smooth.CG: So what gears did you have available for that?MP: Just the Hunter.CG: Ok, so it was Hunter versus Hunter.MP: It was pretty much Hunter versus Hunter. We would have loved to have gotten another gear in there, but at the moment we’re still trying to raise the funds to pay people to work on this.CG: Ok, ok. So that is pretty early on then in terms of video game development?MP: It’s very early on, yeah.

Heavy Gear Assault’s Showmanship

CG: So when you showcased this, well, would you even call it showcasing it?MP: I certainly would, yeah.CG: Did you have any of the showmanship aspects of Heavy Gear Assault in play?MP: A very small portion of it, like ten percent of what we would like to have was actually present in that we did have some of Epic’s newer particle systems ready. We did have at least playable animated gears and whatnot. We had what I would consider to be the bare minimum for the presentation for this game and at present time we’re working on some much, much more ambitious features. In fact, I’m actually taking time off from a very exciting destruction demo that we’re going to be showing off soon.CG: Oh yeah? Well, thank you for your time for that.MP: No problem.CG: Will the showmanship then be similar to wrestling games for console systems that had a popularity meter? Will it be something like that?MP: We would very much like to have mechanics like that in there. That’s actually one of the more exciting aspects of working with Heavy Gear Arena as our base, that we can introduce another dimension of mechanics like that apart from just Gears fighting each other. So all of a sudden it’s not just can you blow up the other team, but there’s an element of how stylishly you can do it. There’s an element of how much you impress the crowd doing it. I think we’re actually looking to that as a potential counter-measure to camping. But yeah, that is something that we definitely want to do and we’re looking at embellishing on the movement system to kind of help supplement that.

Showmanship Will Be an Important Gameplay Aspect in Heavy Gear Assault

Weaponry in Heavy Gear Assault

CG: I personally tend to be a camper, but as I know, it’s boring for people to watch, when someone’s camping, right? [He laughs] Is it too early to even distinguish between Vibro Katanas, Vibro Axes, things like that? Or is there already a difference in gameplay, in terms of look and feel? Does a Vibro Axe have a different animation and occupies a different amount of space on the screen than a Vibro Rapier or something else?MP: Right, right. It’s a little bit too early for me to talk about the specifics of that. We are working on differentiating them, but at the moment most of the differentiation we’ve got is between one-handed weapons and two-handed weapons.CG: What would some of the two-handed weapons be?MP: Polearms?CG: Like a Vibro Halberd, ok.MP: Yeah, the Vibro Halberd. There’s a lot of people on the project who would really, really love to bring in the two-handed chainblade. There’s a couple of two-handed weapons. Let me actually bring up a list really quick that I’ve got, that I can maybe drop one or two of them for you, that we want to have in the game. We have a whole animation list here that we’ve been going through. At the moment, we only really have the one-handed weapons and the shields ready for anything. Polearms… are a big thing. And then, yeah, there’s a sort of distinction of two-handed melee where we’re assuming a two-handed axe or a two-handed sword of some sort.

In Both Heavy Gear Arena and Heavy Gear Assault a Mixture of Melee and Ranged Weapons is Preferred

CG: Ok. So what’s the coolest weapon so far, I know it’s so early in terms of where the game’s at, but for right now what’s the coolest weapon for you?MP: Rocket Pod.CG: The Rocket Pod? So do you distinguish between a Light Rocket Pod and Medium Rocket Pod?MP: We do. And right now it’s the Light Rocket Pod (LRP), to be very specific. We’ve sort of got this model where we start with ground-level and work our way up.CG: And can you fire a volley or do you fire one at a time?MP: It’s a volley.CG: So it’s an LRP, what number is it?MP: It’s the… let me double-check on that… it’s the LRP 32. It’s a 32-set Rocket Pod.CG: And how many does it fire at the same time?MP: It fires one at a time in a sequence.

Heavy Gear Assault Combo Chains and Macros

CG: Cool. So these combo chains, they set Heavy Gear Arena apart from Heavy Gear Blitz, but to me the concept seems native to video games. Am I correct? Are we going to have those fighting game combos in this game?MP: Yes, in fact! That is one of the core features that I’ve been working. I’ve got more or less some of the implementation for it ready. It’s just that we need to fill it in with a few more art assets before it’s really worth looking at and testing. You know, it’s all well and good for me to be doing my derpy programmer art Gear swing with a programmer art polygon nail bat, but in order to actually test it out, we really need some much more strongly differentiated animations of weapons to make sure that it works properly. But yeah, that’s a system that I’ve been working on. We’re referring to it in our game as the Macro System, in terms of the in-universe terminology that we want to use to describe it, but the combos as they are set out in Heavy Gear Arena are the core inspiration for how that system works.CG: What are you calling it? Macro?MP: Macro moves.CG: Like a computer macro?MP: Yeah, that’s exactly the idea. In the universe lore, Macro Moves are basically what they sound like. It’s a control macro that you can bind preset Gear movements that would be normally too complex for a human being to manipulate a Gear into being able to do, but you make it so that you can just press a button on your controls and it instantly does it. And it’s like wow, that is perfect, that fits the concept of developing melee combat and combos and special attacks and whatnot. That fits it so well and it’s such an easy concept to implement. In terms of chaining them together, that’s something that I’m still working on a little bit internally, but yeah, we are planning on having a system where they chain together like in Heavy Gear Arena.

Concept Art of the Khayr ad-Din Arena’s Design Where Gears Will Battle in Heavy Gear Assault

Mike Prinke on Getting Art Updates

CG: When you receive that artwork is that really exciting for you guys as programmers where you finally instead of having whatever kind of skin on something… can you describe that feeling?MP: [Laughs]. Polygon nail bat. It’s a very, very gratifying moment when it does happen. The thing is, at the moment, it happens very, very few and far between because most of our resources for art are dedicated to fleshing out the arena. We’ve got a very small handful of people who work on the Gear and the weapons right now. I think John Davidson does the weapons. The thing is that we don’t get them very often at the moment because of just the way things have been organized and the shortage of resources that we’ve been having. But when we do get them in, yeah, it’s quite nice. I remember when we first replaced our old derpy Hunter with the current shiny sexy race car Hunter that we’ve got now and it was just like “Oh, my God, is this what our game’s going to look like?!”

CG: Do you know type of Hunter it is? Is it just a regular Hunter?MP: It’s a… a high-performance Hunter that’s been…Let me think here. I want to make sure that I have my lore straight. It’s a high-performance Hunter, that’s what I’ll go with. It’s a high-performance Hunter that’s been customized by Paxton Arms with their equipment is how I describe it.

The Gears of Heavy Gear Assault

CG: Now do you know in terms of those scrums and sprints, what’s the next gear that you have planned?MP: It’s the Jager.CG: Which, of course, is the Southern version of Hunter.MP: Yes. And while we’re at developing the Jager, there’s a couple of changes to the Medium Gear systems that we’re doing and we’re using the Jager as an opportunity to explore stuff I really can’t get into, that will be very, very exciting. We sort of had this debate about whether we’d be doing the Jager or the Spitting Cobra and the thoughts were that we’d get more bang for the buck out of refining what the Medium Gear does before we move onto the Assault classes and the Light classes, but those will be coming, of course. I’m not saying that those aren’t coming. It’s just that the Jager has a couple of fun systems coming along with it that we sort of didn’t get in with our last technical design pass on the Hunter and we’re sort of fleshing it out a whole lot.CG: So it also sounds like the next move would be up to a Spitting Cobra or Grizzly instead of necessarily engineering gears.MP: Um, yeah, that is probably the way that we’re going to do it, yeah. I mean the way that we’re developing our future Gear systems, it’d be just crazy if we had to model every single Gear from scratch and give it unique animations, right? So we want to have a system where we’ve got Light, Medium, and Heavy Gears. Or I should say Light, Medium, and Assault Gears and we have the ability to sort of construct them more modularly, not to the point where it’s like Heavy Gear 1, where you can have ape arms on a Light Gear [oversized arms], but to the point where we can more easily trade in and out parts and more easily chassises for the Gears without necessarily having to reconstruct the whole way that the rig works for their animations and whatnot. Basically we’re looking at a way we can develop them smart instead of work ourselves to death in developing these Gears.

Hand Grenades, Hard Stuff to Code, and Gravity

CG: Now Grenades and Heavy Hand Grenades, do they exist in Heavy Gear Assault or will they?MP: Yes. We haven’t prototyped the grenades just yet.CG: Because that would be a whole separate subroutine or subprogram for you guys? You’ve got to help me out here with the video game terms.MP: That’s not a subroutine or a program. That’s just a separate implementation of our inventory object is all. And that’s-, to be fair, that isn’t a very difficult one to put together, which is why we haven’t prioritized it. We sort of focus on the harder stuff to implement first. And then once we’ve got that, we can create variations on that very easily and we can fill in the blanks in between as needed.CG: So what would be some of the harder stuff?MP: The Rocket Pod [laughs]. The Rocket Pod and the various tracking systems that go into developing tracking rockets versus the wandering systems necessary for making the rockets kind of spiral and whatnot.CG: Oh, ok. It’s going to look very cool.MP: Yeah. Those are very complicated projectiles to put together compared to say, the Light Auto Canon’s projectiles.

CG: And will there be gravity drop or is there gravity drop?MP: Um, yes, there is! Depending on the projectile and its mass, it can experience more or less gravity drop, but yeah, we definitely want to preserve the simulation feel from the previous games and we want there to be a very strong element of skill in mastering these weapons, so you’re not going to be pointing instant-hit laser tag guns each other, well unless you’re using lasers, but yeah, you’d expect that. Yeah, the projectiles, they all have a velocity that they’re moving at. You’re going to need to lead targets and you’re going to need to account for projectile drop to some degree. But getting back to your original question, some of the harder things to implement are environmental destruction would be one thing. The physics in secondary movement are something that we’re putting a lot of work into. The damage system in general for Gears is something that we’ve put a whole heck of a lot of work into. It’s one of the things that I think is exciting about playing a mech simulator, is you can blow a mech’s arm off, you can blow a Gear’s arm off, and it’s still functional. It’s missing a limb, but it’s functional.CG: Ok, so that’s some of the funnest parts about Mech Warrior and some of your developers have been involved in the MechWarrior franchise, right?MP: Yes, Jack Mamais was the director of Mechwarrior II Mercenaries. So one of the things that he advocates here that he strongly advocated there was very dynamic damage systems on the Gear. He loves-, he’s very much into adapt to survive kind of combat.

Heavy Gear Assault vs. Heavy Gear Arena: Limb Destruction

CG: That may be a perfect segue because I think that’s a big difference between the tabletop Arena and Heavy Gear Assault would be to actually destroy individual limbs and parts, is that right?MP: Yes.CG: But that’s what we would expect in a video game environment?MP: Yes. In a tabletop environment, you know, I have lots of experience actually developing tabletop games as kind of a hobby. The sort of operative word there is K.I.S.S. You want to keep it very, very simple because human beings have to keep track of all this bookkeeping that you’re doing on a character sheet. It’s more sensitive than people give it credit for in that context, if you have math that goes into just one digit too many, then people are not going to want to play that game. That’s one of the reasons that I favor actually second edition D&D over newer editions because it doesn’t go into double-digit math all that often and I can just do it in my head much quicker. Not that I have a problem doing double-digit math or anything.CG: Of course not.MP: [Laughs]. It’s just really, really super fast. But suddenly we’re dealing with a computer game and all that stuff that would have been on Dream Pod 9’s wish list, we can do, because the computer’s just looking at it for you.

Heavy Gear Arena Artwork From Dream Pod 9 Has Changed Over the Years

Mike Prinke’s Tabletop RPG Days

CG: Right, right. So you just touched upon several different things that I also wanted to talk to you about. What’s your background in tabletop gaming. I can tell that you’re a hardcore gamer there.MP: Uh, yes. I got into tabletop roleplaying games when I was around like eleven or twelve years old. My sister introduced me to second edition Dungeons & Dragons. Prior to that I’d experienced roleplaying games in the form of video games and they were always a sort of magical type of game to me in that the characters felt more real, the worlds around them felt more real, as opposed to something like Contra or Mario Brothers or something like that on the Nintendo. Playing a roleplaying game like Baldur’s Gate or some of the earlier Final Fantasy games was a more immersive experience and a more enriching experience, almost like reading a novel in a way.

And then I got introduced to Dungeons & Dragons and suddenly it was that plus ten times more, it was that, plus the ability to sort of do anything that your imagination could come up with and that absolutely fascinated me. And the idea of being a Game Master fascinated me. Suddenly I could not only be the player character, the hero, I could play all of the villains and all of the NPCs and whatnot. I could play all of the monsters and that was something that fascinated me, so very quickly I got into wanting to be a Game Master for tabletop RPGs and I started trying and failing to run games of Dungeons & Dragons with my friends. I was a bit young to fully understand the rules, so I ended up, I think, making up a lot of stuff as I went, but eventually I got the hang of it. I got into third edition D&D as I went into high school and I got the hang of those rules and ran games with my friends and whatnot.CG: Now were you doing your own setting or were you using a published setting?MP: I always developed my own setting, in fact, the one and only exception to that rule of mine-, I just found it more interesting to develop my own settings and my own stories, it’s just how I am. The one and only exception is actually Shadowrun, because what else are you going to do with Shadowrun other than run the Shadowrun setting? [Laughs] But after that, I got into-, it was really difficult to organize roleplaying groups for me is the thing. High school was a busy time. It kind of was the time when my friends and I were all splitting up and going separate ways. We were all old enough to have cars and go places, but we were also all old enough to be too busy to go places? I ended up running games on IRC, on mIRC, on sorcery.net.CG: Oh wow!MP: That’s where I got started homebrewing games. And usually I would homebrew them based on some existing intellectual property like I was a big fan of Phantasy Star for the Sega Genesis and that’s spelled with a “Ph” instead of an “F”, because Sega is weird like that. I was a big fan of that and I wanted a game that felt like that, but that wasn’t Star Wars. So I’d make a Phantasy Star RPG. The big one that I got involved in that was really, really weird was Super Smash Quest.CG: [Laughs] Uh huh.

Super Smash Quest

MP: That’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s a roleplaying game based on the Super Smash Brothers fighting game series. I had a friend in middle school who wanted to try doing that. I was like “Are you crazy? That wouldn’t make a good roleplaying game!”CG: And are people typing out /me and typing what they do?MP: Yeah.CG: Was anyone hitting someone with a trout?MP: Uh, yes, very, very often!CG: Did you have a response for the IRC trout-hitting/slapping?MP: You know, we never statted that.CG: Well, I meant, did you find it annoying and did you have to punish people or you just tolerated it?MP: You know, people dropped it pretty quickly. They would just get bored with it. They would get bored with the colored text eventually too. But yeah, Smash Quest was interesting. The idea behind it was basically set after the tournament that happened in Smash Brothers Melee. Bowser and Ganondorf, being the sore losers that they were, left the stadium and decided to vow revenge against it and see it destroyed. But the stadium is like the nexus of all worlds or something like that in the Nintendo universe and so it absolutely cannot be jeopardized and if they ever destroy it, it would cause who knows what to happen. And so the thing is, is that the stadium doesn’t have it’s own guardians, right? The different worlds have their own guardians. Mushroom Kingdom has its guardians. Hyrule’s got Link and Zelda and Lylat has Fox McCloud and StarFox Team. But the stadium doesn’t have its own guardians, so Professor Oak and Egad from the Mario and Luigi games put their heads together and came up with a device called the Fighter Remote that would enable them to give the powers of the Smash Brothers fighters to ordinary fans.CG: Ah, ok.

MP: And so the idea behind the game was that the players were fans of the stadium, ostensibly playing themselves, given the powers of the Smash Brothers fighters. And what you’d do in it, is you’d collect their moves, almost like Pokémon, with different B Button moves. So you’d get Fox’s blaster and Pikachu’s Thunder Shock and all that stuff and you could make a custom move set out of that. And that’d really capture the Nintendo spirit while also making it a fascinating tabletop game in that there was a lot of trading going around. A very, very active economy among the players. And the format of it was very mission-based, so if you could imagine, a Nintendo-version of X-Men or a Nintendo-version of Star Trek where there’s away missions and whatnot and everyone goes into the command center and Mewtwo gives them their orders. And it was Mewtwo because he was the most like Professor X. [Laughs]CG: Did you ever watch Centurions, the cartoon?MP: You know, I feel like that’s a familiar name, but I never saw it.CG: Oh, they could dial-up their powers. They could name whatever particular power set and it would teleported to them, but yours they actually had some device or ability that they could trade amongst themselves?MP: Yeah, they basically had the ability to trade powers with each other. That was all very Pokémon-inspired, where there was literally an electric chair powered by Pikachu that would let them transfer their moves between their brains is kind of how it was. It was very cartoony, but it was also immensely popular. We had about 50 players in that game at a time.CG: Oh wow, 50?MP: 50, yes. And they all wanted to play at the same time, but they couldn’t! Like we could at the very, very most support 12 players on a mission. We had to kind of pick and choose how we did it.CG: Was this the late 90s or when?MP: This was early 2000s, around 2001 and 2002. But it was a very, very successful RPG and it sort of bolstered my interest in developing tabletop RPGs, so since then I’ve developed a couple of others, ranging through different topics. Mostly I’ve been focusing on developing an original concept, but I’m not here to talk about that thing just yet.

Mike Prinke’s Miniature Gaming

CG: Yeah, we’ll have to talk about that some other time, Mike. Were you playing any miniature games at this time or war games?MP: I didn’t get into war games for a while actually. I had wanted to get into Warhammer 40K and I had a friend who had a really impressive Tau army, but I couldn’t get into it because it was just too bloody expensive. Looking back, Warhammer miniatures are actually more affordable now than Legos so it probably would have been perfectly ok, but for whatever reason, my parents didn’t want me to get into it. They were like “Oh no! It’s too expensive, you shouldn’t- You aren’t going to paint those things!” and that kind of thing. A lot of discouragement there. But as I got into grad school at SCAD, there was a vibrant Warhammer 40K community, and I was like “Alright, I can try getting into this.” So I picked up Assault on Black Reach and decided I was going to start a Space Marines chapter called the Neon Knights.CG: Uh oh.MP: Their colors being a very dark Gunmetal Grey and variety of neon colors for trim. And now I’ve got a Tau army that I’m working on.

Heavy Gear Blitz, Arena, and References

CG: Do you have a Heavy Gear Arena force or stable of Gears and what about for Blitz?MP: Unfortunately I don’t have any Heavy Gear miniatures right now. I’m sort of been meaning to pick some up, but my wallet’s been a little bit thin. This is actually a little bit odd, but I couldn’t find Heavy Gear Arena or Heavy Gear Blitz miniatures at any of my local game stores anywhere that I’ve ever been in fact. The only pictures of game stores selling it that I’ve ever seen have been from Canada. I don’t know where they sell them or even if they are sold anywhere in my state right now, being that this is Illinois and it’s a very backwater state, except for Chicago. But yeah, I’ve just not been able to track any down is all. As for ordering them online, by the time that looked like a good option, I just didn’t have a whole lot of money to spend on it.CG: You kind of fooled me because you’ve gotten deeply into the lore, right?MP: Yeah. Dream Pod 9 has provided us with a very, very nice collection of books, so I’ve got all the rules for virtually every Heavy Gear game that’s ever been, sitting on my hard drive right now, ready to peruse if we need to figure out something about our mechanics. And we’ve got a technical manual, which we’ve had to very, very closely study in order to get into the damage system and whatnot and how that should work, being that there aren’t any particularly detailed rules about that other than a Gear can get damaged.CG: Exactly, it’s just damage boxes.MP: Yeah. So I’d very much love to get a hold of some of the miniatures though.

CG: What faction were you looking at?MP: Personally, I’d really like to pick up the Nu Coal minis. No particular reason for it, they’re just really, really slick looking minis. But if I had to pick runner-up, it’d be the North. I dig the more angular design, it speaks to a very classic sci-fi sensibility to me. It kind of reminds me a little bit of early Star Wars kind of designs if you applied it to mechs. That probably sounds very silly, but if I had to put it into words, that’s the best that I can do. Of course, I have very fond memories of playing a Kodiak when I was into Heavy Gear, the video games.

The Activision Heavy Gear 1 and Heavy Gear 2

CG: Yeah, so tell me about those Activision titles.MP: Man! What can I say about them?CG: So you played both of them?MP: Yes, I did. I played both of them. My memories of Heavy Gear 1 are, at this point, so early that I can’t really recall much about it. And my experience with Heavy Gear 2 was mainly with the multiplayer, where I was in a guild, and I can’t remember what the name of the guild was for the life of me. I was in so many guilds at the time. At the same time, I think I was into Tribes 2 and I was in a guild there.CG: Is it safe to say that you played the heck out of Heavy Gear 2 though?MP: Yeah, I played a lot of multiplayer with my guild in Heavy Gear 2 and I was never much good at it, is the thing. Because that was right around the time when mouse control started to actually work? And I hadn’t gotten it through my head, because I was stupid and like 12. So I was still trying to aim with the arrow keys and PageUp and PageDown on my keyboard.CG: Oh yes.MP: So I got really good with rockets. I got really good with bazookas basically.

The Cartoon

CG: And did you watch the old CG cartoon? Did you ever see that?MP: No, I never did. I didn’t know that one even existed until I was on this project and people started comparing us to them.CG: Uh oh! How did they compare?MP: Generally the reception to the cartoon is rather negative.CG: Yes! [Read my negative review of Battle for the Badlands here.]MP: Because it’s a bit off-canon from the actual lore of Heavy Gear, I think. At least that’s my understanding of it. And basically people get a little bit anxious, they get a little bit, what’s the word I’m looking for? Blast it!CG: I don’t know, anxious I think would describe how some fans would be.MP: People get a little bit anxious about the fact that we’re using the arena setting when they feel that the cartoon wasn’t necessarily representative of how they pictured the Heavy Gear universe. And the thing is is that we’re not drawing from that cartoon, we’re drawing from the Heavy Gear Arena rulebooks. We’re drawing directly from the canon, so if there’s one thing that I’d like to set people’s minds to rest about, it’s that we’re sticking to the canon on this thing. Like, there’s a few things that we’re supplementing here and there, but usually it’s extrapolations of what’s in the rules or extrapolations of what’s in the tech manual into rules for this game. And we’re working very closely with Dream Pod 9 and we’ve even got a guy who was a marketer at Dream Pod 9.CG: Yeah, John, John Nguyen.MP: Yeah. We’re being very, very careful about that. Other than that I don’t have any familiarity with the cartoon.

What Mike Prinke’s Been Playing Lately

CG: In your Ten Survival Tips over at GameCareerGuide you advise future game designers to keep playing games, what have you been playing lately yourself?MP: Let me see here. Let me bring up my list and think about that. This week has been crazy so I need to refresh my memory. Lately, let’s see, every so often I love to go back and play FTL, I think that’s a really, really awesome game.CG: Ok, FTL, Faster Than Light?MP: That is correct. Basically you command a ship and you’ve got a nice little top-down view of the inside of your ship and the crew and whatnot and you make jumps from star to star and sector to sector trying to outrun a rebel fleet that is just tearing apart the Federation, to deliver a message explaining what the rebel fleet’s weakness is. Basically the whole game is procedural and it gives you random missions and random events all the time, so no two play-throughs are the same. And there’s a number of ships and a number of races and things that your crewmen can belong to that give them different bonuses. Every play-through feels very, very unique and very, very exciting and it’s a very difficult and strategic game. A lot of very strong elements of meaningful decision-making to it, more so than a lot of AAA games do that try to be non-linear, simply in that they give you a goal, and tell you “However you want to accomplish it and whatever objectives you want to pursue on the way, that’s up to you. We’ll just supply the world and let you do it.” That’s a game that I return to fairly often. It’s something that you can play in an hour or two. Very often you can get lost in it where you play it over and over again, but what else here? I picked up Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon and I’m looking forward to playing that that more than I’ve actually played it. Basically I bought it and then immediately had to go into hardcore development mode. Prior to that, it was a lot of Metal Gear Rising and BioShock Infinite I had to pick up, because well… I had to pick it up. It wasn’t a compulsion on my end to pick it up. Everybody was telling me to pick it up and saying “Oh yeah, it’s way better than BioShock.” So I picked it up.CG: And do you agree with them?MP: Uh… do I really want to get into that in this interview?CG: Let’s say no, and keep it briefer, I suppose.MP: Not particularly. I vastly prefer the first one. [BioShock]

Shadowrun Campaign via IRC

CG: Ok. But you’ve been busy playing several. Are you still doing any tabletop games?MP: Yes, I am running a Shadowrun game, in fact. It’s been on a little bit of a hiatus since we’ve been very busy with our preparations for Kickstarter, but yeah, I’ve been running a Shadowrun game that takes place in Los Angeles in 2072.CG: Do you run that in person or online?MP: It’s online. It’s basically the same group, the core group of four people, from back in my days running Smash Quest.CG: And what platform do you use for it now?MP: mIRC.CG: Oh you still use mIRC! Ok.MP: Oh yeah. It’s been on my computer for about ten years.CG: Wow, ok. For me, that dates me to a particular era of my life, when I was using mIRC, but ok. So you use its file send function to send files to people and things like that?MP: Not particularly. We run our games almost entirely with text. Like typing descriptions and things. It gets a little bit slow. Personally I want to use this map program called Roll 20. I’ve got one guy who just doesn’t really want to use maps and I’ve got one person who doesn’t want to do voice chat, because she’s really shy, so I’ve got to stick to mIRC for the sake of that for right now.

CG: Now did you ever get into MUSHing or MUDing?MP: Uh, no, I never did.CG: Ok, but you roleplay via text over the computer which is like, it’s basically like tabletop roleplaying, but you’re describing everything.MP: Yeah, it’s just you get into a lot more description and people end up taking the roleplay aspect of it, of staying in character and whatnot an awful lot more seriously. The thing is that does come at sort of the expense of the strategic element of gameplay. You end up doing a lot less rational decision-making and a lot less planning and looking over information and detective work and whatnot than you do character-driven storyline and stuff. And personally I prefer to be doing the strategy and the detective work. I prefer to have the players looking at a floor plan almost Oceans 11 style, figuring out how they want to get through it, all the while giggling to myself about the traps they don’t know about. [Laughs] That’s where the pleasure comes from for me. But I do get a good portion of that running it through mIRC at least.

CG: Have you tried the Shadowrun Missions or do you just make your own adventures?MP: I am making my own adventure for this one. This is actually only my second attempt at running Shadowrun. My first one didn’t go too great. I had a very vague understanding of the rules the first time. This time I sort of gave each player their own introductory session so I could both get the feel for who they are and what they want to do as players and also to get a feel for the different game mechanics, because Shadowrun is very dense on different sets of mechanics. It’s got a different set of mechanics for hacking, it’s got a different set of mechanics for the astral plane and magic. And then there’s the normal combat, there’s all this stuff. Like practically different worlds that the characters look through, but that’s one of the fascinating things about playing it. I went through them one at a time and I’m like “Ok, now this is making sense. Now I can fit this into the context of how I do it with all four of them.” Now I can kind of put it together in the context of how will all four of these characters work together? When am I going to have the hacker doing the hacking? Cybercombat. What are the other players going to be doing while the hacker’s doing that? That’s sort of a lesson that I took away from video game design is that aspect of getting yourself acclimated to the mechanics sort of one at a time.

Academic and Professional Game Design

CG: So that actually is something I wanted to touch upon. So you were at SCAD and then as an undergrad you did do a bit of video gaming design as part of your college experience?MP: My undergraduate degree was at Michigan State University and the major that I did was Telecommunications/Information Studies Media, the specialization for which was game development, Digital Game Development. That program was going through a lot of growing pains at the time. I’ll supplement a little bit, because it’s actually a nice bridge from one of my previous talking points here. My success with Smash Quest and other tabletop games was what eventually bolstered me to want to go into developing digital games, because when you manage to develop a game that can keep 50 people riveted to their computers-, and we did sessions very frequently, like we did them once a night.CG: Oh wow, ok.MP: Yeah, it was really, really intense. When you can do that that successfully, you sort of sit there and think, “Hmmn, maybe I could develop games professionally.” And so that kind of bolstered me to wanting to be a digital game developer. And then, of course, there was another aspect to it, where I actually did and still do derive a bit of inspiration from George Lucas. The Star Wars films had come out on DVD at the time that I was about to go to college and with them there was a documentary called Empire of Dreams and the story basically showed me that George Lucas was a normal person like myself. He was not this extraordinary godlike human being that just pulled gold out of his rear. He was a normal person who put his pants on one leg at a time. And I sort of thought to myself, “If he could chase his dream in the entertainment industry, why can’t I chase my dream in the entertainment industry?” Which at that point was video game design. And I wasn’t even thinking that I was going to do video game design for a while. I thought I was going to do English as my major or something. Then I went to Michigan State to get back on topic here. Basically if you wanted to do video game development, that was hosted in Telecommunications and it was supposed to be cross-disciplinary, but the Art Department really didn’t want to have anything to do with us, because they were a Fine Arts department and didn’t really do commercial art.CG: Yep, just like I’m sure with Graphic Design, they probably looked down on that.MP: Yeah, actually graphic design was included in the Art Department and they didn’t care for us much either. Then there was Computer Science and they were more cooperative with us, but at the same time, they still didn’t really take game development seriously. Because what would happen is there’d be 300 students sitting in a lecture hall and the professor would go, “Ok, how many of you are here because you want to make video games?” And about 290 of them would raise their hands. And the professor would be sitting there thinking, “Arghh. None of these people are going to be in my class next year. None of these are going to make it into the advanced computer science courses.” And that was all too typically the case. By the time anyone got into Computer Science video game development classes – and there were a few – there was an engine-development class, for instance. By the time they got there, there’d be maybe 10 people taking that class. There’d be maybe 15 people taking a computer graphics class and that’s all just about developing a 3D rendering engine. To get there, you’d have to spend like four years doing computer science.

Meanwhile the bulk of the game development program was done in Telecom. You’d just have to do a couple of Telecom courses before you got into the game development courses, so that’s where I set my primary focus, the issue being that it didn’t really help to develop as much of a core skill as I’d put it. Everybody who’s doing digital game development, I think, has got to have a practical skill. Everybody’s got to have something that they can do on a team that they will do no matter what type of game they’re developing. Let’s say that you really aren’t interested in sports games or something like that, but you have to work on them, because you need to eat. If you’re not interested in sports games, but you’re interested in technical design or gameplay programming, then it doesn’t matter that you’re working on a sports game, you can work on the animation integration for the sports game. Then you’re doing an integration of animation technology, you’re doing physics engine stuff. That stuff interests you, so it doesn’t matter what type of game you’re making. The problem being that Telecomm was a bit of a hodgepodge at the time. It’s a lot better now, as I understand it.

So we didn’t develop much in the way of core skills, so I was sitting there like, “Ahhh… I feel like I need more training.” So I went to SCAD to do my graduate degree. Besides that, I had things I wanted to explore about game development. I had theories and ideas and things that you really didn’t get into them during undergrad and I don’t think anyone gets into them during undergrad, despite a lot of talk about how hot the student scene is right now. For instance, I did my graduate thesis on the psychological architecture of choice-driven narrative in games. Narrative in games is my big passion. In undergrad, I didn’t do anything with it. I was just feeling fortunate to have a character moving around on the screen. If something worked, it was a miracle. If we had a player model, it was a miracle. Whereas in grad school, you can actually finally start approaching those theoretical ideas – those philosophical ideas, I should say – that define the way that we think of games really and actually explore them and actually do a formalized study out of them. The kind of thing that I was expecting to do going into a game development academic program, but for better or worse we stuck to the basics until I got to grad school.

Game Design Theories: Choice-Driven Narratives and Morality

CG: What got tossed out or what got challenged? What was that experience like?MP: It was interesting because not many people-, I shouldn’t say people didn’t challenge my theories, but they generally challenged me to formalize them more, to come up with evidence, and cite articles and things. The stuff that I was concerned with was mainly narrative, the development of narrative through games, this idea that-, and people do contest me on this thing. I believe that narrative and gameplay, mechanics I should say, complement one another. I believe that you use one to reinforce the other and that neither of the two need necessarily be considered mutually exclusive ideas. That’s how I look at it, at least. I also tend to believe in very focused form of storytelling in a way that gives you more breadth of decision-making than if you were to make a game that spans the entire universe of your story. Typically I feel that that’s a mistake that roleplaying games make all too often, is just trying to encompass too big of a story, too big of a scope, where they absolutely must go into everything that happens in the entire universe of this game and as a result, none of it gets focus, and there’s a lot of tell don’t show or as it were, tell don’t play.

I believe in the idea that if something is important to your story or to your characters, that you should make it tangible in some way. Character traits, I believe, you can make into tangible game mechanics. As an example, I point out something like Devil May Cry where the character Dante is the showboating jackass basically and the mechanics encourage you to be a showboating jackass. It’s not just about surviving the battle, it’s about showing off. It’s about doing tricks almost more than survival against demonkind. It’s very much the Tony Hawk of hack-n-slash games. And that, I found, was a very inspiring thing for me. There I am trying to apply concepts like that to a choice-driven narrative and people are like “Are you crazy?! Don’t you want to talk about Mass Effect? Isn’t that the best kind of choice-driven narrative there is?!” And I’m like, “Ehhh, I don’t really think so.” So if anything I think I spent a lot of time challenging other people, but I did get challenged in that I had at least one professor who was like, “You know, when I play a game like Mass Effect or Dragon Age or The Elder Scrolls, it seems to me that the matter of doing a choice-driven narrative doesn’t really matter because I experience it the way I experience it. And all the other possibilities basically go ignored. And sure, if I talk to people about it, fine. Basically I play it once and that’s the way I play it and it’s done.” So I needed to convince people at the same time that I was trying to tell them choice-driven narrative really gets overblown, at the same time I also needed to convince them that it was worth exploring. Sorry, I’m sort of remembering this as I go. I’m sorting of thinking aloud in a way.CG: Yeah, you’re maybe saying in Fallout 3, that maybe you’d like to experience what Megaton is like if you don’t blow it up, versus if you do to go over to that Tenpenny Towers or whatever?MP: Yeah, yeah. Where that comes in, where I was finally able to break the surface of that discussion was in the end, it’s not necessarily a matter of player agency. It’s not necessarily a matter of the player getting to make choices that make huge impacts on the world around them, that change literally the whole course of the story. Because there’s only so much of that you can do in a digital game at all. At the end of the day, it’s in 1’s and 0’s, it’s kind of set in stone. There’s only so much leeway you’re able to program in. The real appeal of choice-driven narrative, I postulate, is that there’s this aspect of personalization that you experience, of interpreting the story, that makes it worthwhile. So when you blow up Megaton in Fallout 3, you’re interpreting your character and the values of the story, whatever you may perceive them to be, in a different way from someone else who’s doing the same thing. It’s kind of an extrapolation of the Holodeck concept in kind of a way. Instead of exploring a story as a linear thing, as kind of being fed the story and the values that go with it, you are exploring them tangibly. You are getting hands-on experience with the themes through the interactions that you have with the game. And that particular interaction in Fallout is a very strong thematic point in that story where you’re basically making the decision about how the world should be treating itself, how it should run from this post-apocalyptic state it’s in. Should we be trying to eliminate these pockets of poverty by just getting rid of them or should we give them a chance to grow and rebuild themselves? That’s a major theme and they give you an interaction that lets you get hands-on with it. And those are the moments that I find are the most powerful in a choice-driven narrative. Likewise if I look at something like Heavy Rain, for all that game’s faults and its story, a simple moment like Ethan Mars going to his refrigerator and having to decide whether he wants to drink beer or whether he wants to drink orange juice while his son watches cartoons in the background can make a world of difference for your perception of that character. Or you can be a pig and drink both.

Coding Morality in Game Design

CG: Yeah, but what about the moralizing factor of that? Sometimes it seems like you have to figure out what the designers’ moral values are, because to us playing it, we go “That’s not bad. That’s not good. Why did I lose Karma?”MP: That’s kind of an issue with choice-driven narrative systems, is that developers too often oversimplify it to good and evil, when, in fact, there is a huge breadth of themes that you could explore and good and evil are just one theme. If you look at something like Infamous, right? There’s a game that’s pushing the good evil thing and in a way it’s not terribly inappropriate because you’re looking at electricity and positive and negative polarity as a way to kind of connect that in, but the thing is, that’s not really what about the story is about. It’s about surviving in this city and this idea of responsibility versus selfishness. But instead of picking up on responsibility vs. selfishness, they picked on good and evil. And you can consider one value or the other to be better or worse depending on the circumstances that you’re in. If it were simply a survival situation and they said “There’s only so many resources to go around, how are you going to allocate them?” then it might have come off very differently, but instead they literally had a Good Evil meter and they had to shoehorn good and evil decisions into every beat of the story, even when there really wasn’t a difference between which one would get you further. Like very early on, there’s a scene where you can either electrocute a guy to death or you can tell him that his wife is dead and i’m sitting there going “Number 1, why do I have to electrocute him to death? Why can’t I just knock him out through the bars? Why can’t I just stun him. Number 2, why is that even a thing thematically? Why would I even think about killing him just to get past this door?” It’s a moment that’s there purely to introduce you to this mechanic of the Good-Evil Meter and there’s so many of them throughout that game.

Likewise there’s the idea of good and evil points in general, which I think is a flawed model for developing the concept of morality and decision-making in games. If you think about the decision-making process, there’s a model of decision-making called rationality. Limited rationality is the more refined way of looking at it. It basically postulates that people look at the world through a lens of risk versus reward and it’s dictated by what preferences they have for what sorts of variables they want to maximize and minimize and what options they think they have as far as getting it accomplished. If you think about good or evil points as a resource in that context, you can’t trade them. The rest of the world doesn’t work on good and evil points. You can’t go to a store and trade five points of evil karma for something. It basically has no tangible value to anyone except in very, very few peculiar instances that I think have influenced the scope of narrative-choice in a way that really shouldn’t have. Particularly, I’m thinking of Knights of the Old Republic where yeah, good and evil points are perfectly appropriate. It’s Star Wars. Literally the whole world works on this idea of Light Side and Dark Side energies conflicting, so that is absolutely a tangible resource in this world. But everybody sort of looked at that and said, “We should do good and evil points too. This is really cool.” And then it sort of went downhill, because they weren’t doing Star Wars. Star Wars is the only setting where that really works.

That’s where I think the morality idea kind of falls off. You shouldn’t be looking at it as the idea of exploring morality, because morality varies from person to person. The ideals that motivate what’s good and evil in our minds are basically… any ideology can have a very different way of looking at killing, for instance, any ideology can have a very different way of looking at a mundane thing like eating meat. It’s a question. When you talk about ideology, basically the only way you can possibly write a story is that the ideology is taken for granted. That’s the whole message behind Star Wars, in fact, is that the ideology is taken for granted. It’s the most basic type of story to tell is a morality play where you are just showing the audience what good is and what evil is and equating it to some set of values. In Star Wars, it would be probably freedom versus power. That’s really the operative theme and it’s explored through a mask of good and evil. But the key to it is good and evil are taken for granted and they don’t spend a lot of time asking what good and evil are, they just let the story take it for granted, and the action unfolds, and you get to spend time enjoying this great adventure. But then you get into something like Shadow the Hedgehog, which feels the need to belabor whether or not the lead character is a good guy or you play something like Fable. You play something like Fable which belabors the question of are you good or are you evil. Or Infamous, which belabors the question of are you good or are you evil? And by the time we get done answering this very, very basic question, not only is the game likely to be wrong in the player’s mind, but the game is also going to be over.

Story Arcs in Heavy Gear Assault? Campaign versus Arena

CG: We’ve just been talking a lot about story arcs and narrative. As far as gameplay and story arcs, will there be one in Heavy Gear Assault.MP: [Blows air] One of our stretch goals is to try and develop a campaign. That requires a lot of resources to develop a single-player or co-op campaign, that requires an awful lot of resources, more than I think that people imagine. Single player is, on one hand, easier to program because you don’t necessarily need to do the network programming aspect of it. On the other hand, it’s more costly because you need more cinematic stuff. You need to spend time developing single player levels which you balance very differently from a multiplayer level and are much harder to test, in fact.

There’s some fun stories about what the Ratchet & Clank testing team had to go through, where they had what’s called Help Desk, which is this pop-up that comes up, telling you “You can jump over obstacles if you press the X Button.” Basically if a kid, a 3-year old kid is playing, they stay in the room too long, right, imagine having to test every single one of those. Every single message like that. If you’re building LEGO Star Wars and you’ve got messages like this that help kids through the game if they sit there for like ten minutes in the same room, imagine being the guy sitting there at the test machine moving the character through the levels sitting there for fifteen minutes desperately trying to maintain your concentration while waiting for this message to pop up so you can confirm that it pops up and that it doesn’t have spelling errors and that it stays up long enough to be readable. And then all somebody has to do is say “Hey, Mike!” over your shoulder and then you look away and then you look back and you see the pop-up disappear and you’re like “Oh crap!”

That’s the kind of thing that you have to test in a single [player campaign], and I’m not saying that Heavy Gear [Assault] would need a system like that necessarily, being that it’s a core PC game, we know that generally we’re looking at a more adult audience that can put things together for themselves. Not that we need something like that, but every interaction in a level, every scripted event in a level, right down to a simple piece of background scenery needs to be tested and confirmed, every elevator, every door has to be tested and confirmed without bugs. That process in of itself takes a whole lot of time and more people than we’ve got on this project, let alone the art resources and the level design resources necessary to create it.

CG: What fills that narrative gap then? Is it the level designs or different arenas? Different arena configurations?MP: In terms of the narrative experience that we definitely can deliver, yeah, we’re filling in multiple different arenas in different locations. Mostly centered around Khayr ad-Din, but spread out a little bit. There’s some talk among the team of exploring a couple of other cities. And then ideally there’s a sort of, how to put this, there’s a big interaction to this that I don’t necessarily want to give away yet. What I will say is that there is we’re trying to do a little bit more than just develop a standard free-to-play game, where you just drop into a map and that’s it. We’re doing a bit more than the bare minimum Death Match sort of thing. We’re looking at a very unique system for developing player lobbies and whatnot. And we are looking at developing a stronger narrative experience through the different events that are kind of going to go on in the community. We’re looking at really using the community as our means of developing a narrative as opposed to a single player campaign at the moment. We do really want to do the single player campaign. We’ve got just awesome ideas in mind for how we’d like to develop it and the types of mechanics we’ve got go into so much more detail than the previous Heavy Gear video games, that we think we’d be able to make the most awesome single player campaign that any mech simulator has ever seen. I don’t want to say on a scope that you’ve never seen before, but there’d be interactions in ways that you haven’t seen before. Particularly revolving around your relationship with the machine, with the Gear, right. Most mech simulators are content to have you play as the mech and that’s it.CG: Right.MP: Our perspective is that you are not just the mech. You are the pilot and you have a mech. And that’s about as far into that as I can go.CG: Ok, so I’m picking up, and you don’t have to say anything to this, but maybe you could exit the mech.MP: Maybe. [James Taylor confirms this in the GDC 2013 Interview by IndieStatik]

North vs. South, Peace River and Nu Coal

Peace River Gladiator Miniature for Heavy Gear Arena

CG: OK. Do you think that players will naturally want to echo the North vs. South divide, things like that?MP: Players will definitely have their preferences for what types of Gears they want to use. Already in the community there’s that debate happening on the Facebook page where people are going, “I’m totally sticking with my babies, the Northern Gears.” And then someone looks at a piece of Lorenz’s concept art of the Hunter versus the Jager and they’re like “I don’t know. For that Jager, I think I could be convinced to go Southern.” They just naturally want to partition themselves on North and South. I think if that’s what they want to do, just let them do it and have fun with it. If that’s where they perceive the fun of this, if they want to faction off, and they want to kind of cheerlead their side, then more power to ’em. Although we would like to explore the mechs outside of just the Northern and Southern sets of Gears.CG: Yeah, Peace River definitely.MP: Peace River is one of our stretch goals and then, yeah, Nu Coal is another one of our stretch goals, I think.

On Monday, April 15 I called and interviewed Kevin Siembieda over the phone about the upcoming Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter. While other legendary RPG designers have worked on multiple game systems over the years, Siembieda has spent the last three decades delving deep into his own Palladium rules system producing titles at Palladium Books like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Beyond the Supernatural, Ninjas & Superspies, Heroes Unlimited, and of course, RIFTS and Robotech. As of April 18, the Kickstarter from Ninja Division is LIVE and seeking to raise $70,000 in 32 days, but he had a lot to say on Monday about his playtest experience with Robotech RPG Tactics, the newer post-2005 edition of the Palladium Robotech RPG, his experience wargaming, Kickstarter, and RIFTS.

CG: First off, Minmei or Lisa Hayes?KS: Oh, I’m a Lisa Hayes guy. I like women who are mature. [Laughs] As simple as that.CG: What’s your favorite song that Minmei sings though?KS: “We Will Win”, no question about it. That fight scene was epic.CG: You just had your birthday. How old did you turn?KS: I am 57. I feel like 27, but the white hair says otherwise.CG: You’ve had that for some time, right?KS: Yeah, I started turning grey when I was in my twenties, so yeah, my hair turned silver about ten years ago. It just gets a little whiter, but blondes have more fun, so I’m enjoying being a platinum blond.

Siembieda on Robotech Eras

CG: There seems to be a vocal community of fans desperate for the Masters and New Generation sagas, do you have anything to tide them over? I know you mentioned recently that hopefully you’ll be including them, but any further news on that?KS: There is no “hopefully” including them. I mean, when we started this project, our goal from the very beginning was to do all eras of Robotech. So that has been our plan from day one and that continues to be our plan. It’s easier to tackle them pretty much in order, starting with Macross, so that’s what we’re doing. We plan on banging out pieces for every era of Robotech.

The Newer Edition of the Robotech RPG

CG: For someone like me who played Robotech from Palladium back in the ’90s, what about the newer edition of the game, what are some reasons for someone like me to pick it up and take a look at it?KS: If you’re talking about the current role-playing game, let me just clarify for people who may not be familiar with the game line or haven’t looked at it in a long time: back in 1986 we came out with the Robotech role-playing game that was based on the Harmony Gold anime series and it was hugely popular. And we had that license for like fifteen or seventeen years, I forget what it was, where we let it go after a while because we just kind of thought that we had done everything we could with it and other things were happening.

Then in 2005 we got that license back and one of the big differences is back in the ’80s and ’90s when we originally had the license there was not the wealth of information that we have now. And even Harmony Gold as the licensor didn’t provide us with the kind of information we needed to do what we as fans [saw as] a truly accurate representation of the television series. For example, Southern Cross, we had a bunch of cool animation/artwork/model sheets, but we had no information as to what a lot of that stuff was. You got to remember, this was back in the day before the internet or just as the internet was starting to take off and a lot of this information just was not available. Harmony Gold didn’t have it, we didn’t have it, and I think in the earlier days of Harmony Gold, they were really focusing and looking at Robotech as being their unique extrapolation from original material, which of course, it very much is, but in the advent of the web and the world getting smaller, where everything’s at your fingertips, there’s just a lot more information available about the original material and I think the new generation of creators at Harmony Gold, such as Tommy Yune and a bunch of other guys, sat back and said “Gee, it’d be cool if this stuff was more accurate and was more representative of what you see in the TV series. That’s some of the fun we’ve really been having with the re-tool of this; when we launched Robotech in 2005, we really looked at it as if we had never seen the license before and we gathered all kinds of information. This time Harmony Gold had a wealth of information they could share with us and input and ideas and stats on the various ‘mechs and weapons and characters and things. We dug up even more and so little bits of it are still extrapolations of things.

For example, Southern Cross in particular, there’s just a truckload of new material that people have never seen before. I mean there’s power armor and robots and drones and vehicles and a ton of weapons that are all part of the Army of the Southern Cross and it really makes Southern Cross or the Masters Saga, so much more dynamic and exciting and fun, because there’s just tons and tons of what I call “toys”, like I said, weapons and power armor, all kinds of stuff that you get glimpses of in a TV show, but there’s never really been a lot of information on, so that’s been a blast for us, to do stuff like that. We really just feel like the representation of what we’re doing is so much truer to the TV show than our first run with the series and it’s been a blast doing that. So there’s just a lot of good stuff.

And then when you were talking about Robotech RPG Tactics, that’s even going beyond the strictly roleplaying stuff. With RPG Tactics we’re taking the Robotech environment and the characters and mainly focusing on the mecha and the combat and coming up with an extrapolation on the roleplaying game that enables people to basically play a fast-paced, combat-oriented tabletop game. So you’ll actually have one 1:285th scale plastic figure, what we’re calling game pieces. The detail is just beautiful. You’ll be able to play skirmish games, you’ll be able to scale it up to mass combat. It just brings a whole new dimension and the fact that you’ll now have these beautifully sculpted and detailed figures, that’s wonderful, because obviously in a combat game scenario you really need to see your figures and know where the guy is, where that character is or where that mech is, and where he’s going. We have all these tight, very formal, very crisp playtested-like-crazy set of rules that allow you to really engage in a broad range of combat. It’s just a blast.

Living Legend: Kevin Siembieda at the Palladium Books Booth at Gen Con 2012

And then for Robotech collectors and fans, these figures are gorgeous. As a fan myself, if someone else were producing this product, I’d want to buy it just because I want the damn figures on my shelf! I’ve never really been a tactical combat guy or a wargamer, so that has limited appeal, although I think this game for me personally as a roleplayer and a Robotech fan, this game is so fun that a lot of people regardless of what their orientation is for Robotech can pick it up pretty easy and have a lot of fun.

Kevin Siembieda’s Wargaming Experience

CG: You’ve touched on a couple of things I wanted to ask you about. So you said you’re not much of a miniature wargamer yourself? What have you played?KS: For me, I’ve dabbled with a few things. I played a couple of homegrown things with some friends in the past. I’ve played Ironclads a million years ago. I played Battletech. I’m familiar with the market, so I’m familiar with some of the games by Fantasy Flight and of course, the Warhammer 40K stuff, but I’m very much a roleplayer.CG: So yeah, you don’t have a Warhammer army yourself?KS: No, sir! [Laughs] But I have plenty of friends who do and that’s the beauty of this product too. For role-players, the pieces are really nice to have too whether they’re just display pieces or whether they represent your character as you’re playing through the game. It’s nice to be able to position them, so everyone knows where their mech is and what their characters are doing. That’s the beauty of this game. The way we approached it is to try to create a game that would have really broad appeal so that any number of Robotech fans can dive in and find some use and find some pleasure with it.

Robotech RPG Tactics 1:285 Scale

CG: Now why the scale of the 1:285th, is that going back to Battletech and other things, that that’s just the micro armor scale?KS: Yeah, again, we know enough and, of course, the Ninja Division guys know that market inside and out, because they are the guys from Sodapop Miniatures and Cipher Studios. And yeah, they felt that was the best scale, because it coincides with a number of other games and that way you can always mix and match, for those who want to do that. You can mix and match different models and miniatures from other games, especially depending on how far you want to take this stuff. You can have different creatures and mechs and stuff that could be from alien worlds and things, because ultimately all the games you’re only limited by your imagination, so we wanted people to have a wide range of possibilities. Plus, it’s also the scale that most people seem to really want! When we ourselves started to explore this market, we put the question out there and asked the gamers what they really wanted to play and the overwhelming response was the 1:285th scale. So if that’s what players want, then that’s what we’re going to give them. [After the interview, Kevin Siembieda also mentioned the ease of finding terrain in the scale as another contributing factor.]

CG: Now what is Palladium Books role in Robotech RPG Tactics exactly? Are you in partnership or is one of you the licensor? How is that working?KS: Yeah! Palladium is the licensor. We have the rights to the Robotech property for roleplaying and various other things. We’re also going to be the publisher, so we’re bankrolling all of this. And of course, we’ve had input with game design, because while I may not be a wargamer per se, I certainly know Robotech inside and out, know what feel we need for the game. And game design, the fundamentals of game design, apply to most mediums so you want stuff that’s fast-paced and fun, that creates the television experience. It’s all translation. We’ve been working with Sodapop/Cypher Studios/Ninja Division guys to achieve all that.

CG: Who is actually masterminding the Kickstarter campaign? Are you behind that or is Ninja Division doing that?KS: Well we’re working really closely with the Ninja Division guys, but they are the guys behind the Kickstarter. It’s simply a matter of they have the experience and we don’t.CG: Right.KS: So yeah, we’re deferring to their expertise.

“As a Robotech fan, I mean this is just a product that I would kill for. It’s the kind of thing that I’ve wanted to see for the last 25 years.”

CG: I know you’re just as excited as the fans for the Kickstarter, so what are you personally looking forward to getting your hands on?KS: [Laughs] Oh my gosh! It’s one of these things that’s been killing me! Because Ninja Division doesn’t want us to reveal a lot of what is going to be in the Kickstarter or what’s going to be in this game line. It’s been sort of killing me not to be able to tell people that yes, there’s going to be all the Destroids and yes, the M.A.C. II Monster is freaking gorgeous! And all the figures are gorgeous. As a Robotech fan, I mean this is just a product that I would kill for. It’s the kind of thing that I’ve wanted to see for the last 25 years. So it’s a double kick for us that we get to be the guys who can do this. It’s been very exciting!

The M.A.C. II Monster: Wait for Kickstarter to See the “Freaking Gorgeous” Sculpt

Kevin Siembieda’s Robotech RPG Tactics Playtest Experience

CG: Are you going to be more of a Zentraedi guy or more of the United Earth Defense Forces?KS: When I was playtesting I actually played the Zentraedi, so both sides are fun to play.CG: So you also just answered another question I had. So playtesting: you’ve definitely played the game quite a bit yourself?KS: Oh, heck yeah! For me, it’s been a learning curve. But I think that worked really good, because I asked a lot of the lowest common denominator questions. One of the things I found, for example, is while the game designers were focusing on certain elements of the game, I – as just a Robotech fan with very little war game experience – I stepped in and when I’m playing the war game, I’m like “Well, why can’t I do this?” And “Why can’t I do that?” And “Can my character do this?” And when they didn’t have an answer, I’m like “Well, why not?” [Laughs]CG: Do you think that you have shaped the game a bit or did they just explain more of wargaming terms to you?KS: Oh, well in some cases, it was a matter of “Ok, these are common tropes in this kind of game and this is why we do this.” And in other cases, “Oh yeah, gosh, why can’t we do that?” And “You’re right, it should be faster.” Or “It should be able to do this.” Yeah, I definitely contributed conceptually to what the game should be and my focus is simply to recreate the television experience. If you see it on TV, you should be able to play it. If you couldn’t, it was like, “Well, we need to fix that.” And that’s what the guys who know the rules sat down and did.

CG: I forget the technical name for this, like the Alpha Missile Strike [Macross Missile Massacre], the thing with all the missiles swirling around in the air, but is there an in-game equivalent to that?KS: Oh yeah, absolutely. Again, at the risk of being a nerd (but that’s what I am)… everything you can see in the television show, we are trying to provide in the gaming experience, so, yes! You can have an Armored Valkyrie or a Super Valkyrie just loaded up with missiles and unleash! You can have missile volleys, you have all kinds of great stuff. Again, everything you can see in the show is pretty much there. There are some exceptions and some modifications and some elements – like a lot of the playtesters have brought up questions about three-dimensional play and… there’s some things of sitting back and saying “You know what? These will be saved for advanced rules.”

CG: Ok. I think even with Ninja Division and the Youtube video, I think they mentioned that one of your characters could be Miriya or play as Roy Fokker, right?KS: Yeah! Well, I don’t know how I can reveal this quite yet, but yeah, there’ll be mechanisms in there where you can actually play specific characters or use the specific characters as part of your squadron and their inclusion gives you and your team bonuses and such. And then, yeah, especially for roleplayers, it’s easy enough for you to just put your own character in there or a specific TV character and “This model represents that character or another character.” Go to town, man! Just have fun!

John Cadice from Ninja Division on Robotech RPG Tactics at GAMA Trade Show

CG: Were you playing with a measuring tape?KS: Yeah, yeah! We were using laser pointers and measuring tapes, yep.CG: So it’s not a hex or grid? You were measuring in inches or centimeters?KS: Right. I believe it was inches?

CG: Is it a game with alternating activation or do you just sit there while your opponent moves all his figures and then you go?KS: That’s one of the things that we’ve been fooling around with and… [Kevin Siembieda later clarified:] The fact of the matter is that Robotech® RPG Tactics™ is most definitely turn based. It uses a fast-paced turn system with players trading off activating squadrons during each turn. This helps ensure that a player never has to sit and wait for long periods of time while his opponent is moving and attacking with his entire army. One of our main goals in the design of this game is to keep the action fast and reflective of the action you see in the anime.

CG: What about M.D.C. [Mega Damage Capacity]? Is there an MDC stat or is pretty much all the damage MDC anyways?KS: Yeah, it’s pretty much all MDC, but yeah, there is an MDC stat. You know, obviously it’s not the same as in the games. [Garbled.] You don’t have to pull out a calculator to do the math, but yeah, it’s basically an MDC equivalent.

CG: Ok. So someone at Ninja Division had to point out all the units to make them equivalent, like one Zentraedi Battle Pod is worth how many ever Destroids?KS: Oh yeah.CG: Did you have any input on that or you left that to them as wargamers?KS: I pretty much left a lot of the real nitty gritty to them as wargamers, although again, it was one of these things where… you know, in the course of all this, because we have been really working on this for- oh God, it’s probably close to six months now, that we fooled around with everything. For example, I think the game started out with a-, in fact, I know the game started out with three Zentraedi to one Earth Defender. And then we adjusted that to two, and then we adjusted it to one and a half, and that was really imbalanced. And then I think we’ve ended up back at what we originally started with, as three Zentraedi to one Earth Defender.CG: Ok. And we’ve seen Rick Hunter do that many times easily.KS: Yeah, exactly! And again, we all rewatched the TV show, we all talked a lot about it amongst ourselves, and then we sent in our input to the various people. We had weekly discussions, telephone conferences with the Ninja Division guys and some of our own guys. A few of the playtesters really know their stuff too. We got some really valuable input from a lot of the playtesters and we had a lot of playtesters, because we really wanted to get a lot of different views. In fact, one of the things we did when we sent stuff out to various playtest people is we tried to do a range from experienced tabletop gamers to guys like me, who have never or rarely picked up a war game, to guys who can quote from twenty different systems and armies of, like you were saying earlier, Warhammer. Here’s my 400 Warhammer figures or whatever game they’re into. So we really did want to get a good range of input and see what people who were experienced and inexperienced thought. People who knew Robotech and who didn’t know Robotech. So it’s been really, really an experience getting all that input.

CG: Are there any weird stretch goals for fans like Rick’s civilian plane? Or floating giant fish out in outer space, any weird stuff like that?KS: [Laughs] You know, I don’t really think I’m at liberty to say.

Timeline for Kickstarter

CG: Haha, ok. Any update on when that Kickstarter will be? I’ve heard April 19th at the latest, but I also heard this coming Saturday. Any update on that?KS: Yeah, we are shooting to get that up as soon as possible. The 18th would be ideal. We’ve even been talking about doing it sooner if that would be possible, but it looks like the 18th is probably a solid date, but certainly within there, give or take a day or two. We need to do it right. And right now, the Ninja Division guys are just-, since they’re doing 99% of the work on the Kickstarter itself, I mean they’re just busting their backs right now to get it all up and done. We’ve been going in and mostly pointing, you know, “Change this. Fix that. Tweak that. Here’s a better image. Here’s a suggestion. Here’s a this. Oh yeah, that’s approved.” That sort of thing. And they’re doing all the heavy lifting on this, so whatever they can get done and how quick they can do it and make it look good. Because we don’t just want to crap it out. And, of course, Harmony Gold has to take a look at it and approve it and hopefully that’ll simply be a matter of a quick look and approval, but that could be… some delays if they want us to change something or tweak something, but they’ve been great to work with so far. We’ve been getting good, quick approvals from them. They’re super-excited about this project too. On 04.16.13 Kevin Siembieda emailed that the Kickstarter will be THURSDAY.

Robotech Live Action Movie: No Real News

CG: Of course they should be. So the pressure’s on for me so I need to type this up pretty quickly. Do you know anything about the Live Action movie or is that in development hell? What do you know?KS: Uhhhhh, yeah, I guess I don’t really know anything officially.CG: Ok, so obviously it would benefit everyone involved, but you also have no control over that, right?KS: I have absolutely no control over that and I’ve heard some rumors that it’s in development – and by the way those rumors did NOTcome from Harmony Gold, so … I really don’t know if it’s in development or not.

The 2006 Palladium Plea to Fans and Kickstarter

CG: You made a very public plea years ago in 2006 for funding and support from your fans. So now in conjunction with Ninja Division, you’re going to be Kickstarting; do you see those as any different?KS: I guess yes and no? It’s different in that the circumstances were certainly different, but yeah, ironically we kind of did crowdfunding before we even realized-, well, actually before crowdfunding even existed. In 2006 we were just in those desperate straits of having basically been sabotaged with embezzlement and theft that put us on the verge of bankruptcy. And we were in desperate straits and there was just no way to raise the kind of revenue we needed to stay alive and I came up with the idea of-, gosh, we’d been around at the time for 25 years and what if we went to our fans and said, “Hey, this is what’s going on. We’re in desperate straits. And if you’re planning on buying books, please buy them now.” And “Here’s a bunch of special items, prints and things, T-shirts that we’re making now to fund all this and keep us from going out of business.” The fans were just phenomenal. It was unbelievable. It was nothing short of a miracle. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life, which is pretty incredible, because they turned a nightmare situation into something wonderful and beautiful. Because in addition to just the financial support we got all these emails and phone calls and letters, just espousing how much they loved us and the products, you know, “Thank you for doing these.” And “We’re not going to let you go out of business.” Yeah, it was pretty incredible! But obviously this is a much more formalized thing. I think crowdfunding through companies like Kickstarter is fantastic! Especially in the new, sort of global economic environment that we’re in. It’s so hard to find one or two investors willing to pump in X amount of money and it’s great if you can go to the people who actually know your stuff and love your stuff and want to support your stuff and get them to put in the money. It’s a win-win for everyone, because they get cool product and you get the resources you need to do those cool products. Yeah, it’s a great idea.

Siembieda on RIFTS and Possibility of Rifts RPG Tactics

CG: There were RIFTS miniatures in the 1990s produced with RAFM. Any comment this early on on whether we might see a Spider Skull Walker in resin anytime soon?KS: [Laughs] That’s a great question! I don’t know about someday soon, but yeah, we would love to see that. We would love to see a RIFTS tabletop game and yeah, wait till you guys see some of the designs in the Northern Gun books. Oh man! There could be some beautiful, epic RIFTS battles, man. It’d be great, yeah. We’d love to see that. But we’re not counting our chickens before they hatch and we have NO plans. I don’t want to start any rumors. We have no plans to do a RIFTS tactical game at this time.CG: None? Really? Ok. So at least this will give you guys a chance to see how the process works and so on with Kickstarter and everything else. If you did it, it seems like Kickstarter [or crowdfunding] would be involved.KS: Oh yeah, absolutely. If we did do a RIFTS RPG Tactics game line, we would certainly do it as a Kickstarter-funded thing. I’m not saying we’re not going to do it, I’m just saying that we’re trying to stay focused [laughs] on what we have now. Once we launch this, if it’s as successful as everyone seems to think it is- because everyone from the Ninja guys to the gaming base that we are tapped into to our distributors, – everyone seems to think that it’s going to be a big deal. Everyone seems excited about it. So yeah, if this is the success we think it will be, then after we have Robotech in all eras of Robotech in the pipeline to come out as part of this game line, then we’ll think about what we might do with RIFTS. But yeah, I think it’d be a hoot to do it.

The Success of RIFTS

CG: RIFTS, compared to Robotech… RIFTS of course came out later, but it seems to be the flagship product for Palladium Books, right?KS: Yeah! Oh yeah, in fact our first big hit game was Ninja Turtles. Our next big hit game was Robotech and then our – chronologically – our third big hit game was RIFTS. But RIFTS eclipsed both of those. Yeah, it was just a mega-hit. People love the thing. It’s been around for twenty-some years now and still going strong.CG: Any figures on number of books published for RIFTS?KS: Oh god! [Laughs] Including sourcebooks and things? Millions. I think the- Oh gosh! I should have those numbers at my fingertips. I think RIFTS Core Rulebooks alone- I should say the RPG and the RIFTS Ultimate Edition, you know, the two versions of the core rules have sold something in the neighborhood of 350,000 copies. So yeah, it’s pretty strong. There’s got to be a dozen source books for Rifts – World Books – that have sold 100,000 copies all by themselves. But a lot of that goes back to the heyday of the ’90s when RIFTS was kicking and roleplaying was just hot. The first six Rifts titles all hit 100,000 or more. So, yeah. It was big! When we came out with RIFTS we printed 10,000 copies and thought, “This is a three month supply if the game is as hot as we think it will be.” And we sold out in three weeks and we were like “Holy crap!” And we pressed 20,000 the next time around and that sold out in like two months. Yeah, we knew we had something special at that point.CG: Well, I wish you the greatest of success in a similar way with Robotech RPG Tactics then!KS: Thank you, Brant. I appreciate that.

Mirror Box Games: Chaosmos

Joey Vigour from Mirror Box Games presented Chaosmos. While still in development, Chaosmos is a science fiction board game wherein the 2-4 players search for the mysterious singularity, the Ovoid, in a “cosmic treasure hunt.” The game is still so new that brothers Joey and Danny Vigour are still deciding on its final components, but have a rough estimate of a $40-50 price. What’s clear to the Brothers Vigour and their two co-designers is that Chaosmos’s play style is “emergent”, with no particular path to victory. Whoever holds the Ovoid at the end of the game will be the victor. Players who have good memories and deductive powers though will be rewarded because the game has a Clue-like element with an envelope on each of the game’s 10 planets. Players have a maximum 7-card hand, but can trade out cards on the planets. The Pheromonic Harpoon is a potent weapon card in Chaosmos, but a player with the Pheromonic Recoiler card can resist its devastating effects. Keeping track of where the two device cards are is part of the challenge of the game, but the focus of Chaosmos isn’t really battles, says Vigour. Instead, battles are just a further way of obtaining information.

Brothers Joey and Danny Vigour (center and left) Demo Chaosmos at the Mirror Box Games Booth

In addition to the 10 planets, there are also 10 aliens, each with its own unique powerful racial ability. These racial abilities combined with players’ hands of cards makes “every player begin to start thinking they’re invincible,” according to elder brother Joey Vigour. For example, the alien Drusu the Scryer can look at other players’ hands and into the planetary envelopes with his Scrying ability. A powerful ability, but the Scryer can also tip off his opponents by his probable knowledge of the Ovoid’s location, so discretion is advised. Mirror Box Games’ efforts at demoing the game at Game Night and in the Exhibitors’ Hall elicited interest from attending distributors and game publishers, with at least one prominent company making the brothers a serious offer at the show. Mirror Box Games has not rushed to a decision about how Chaosmos will be produced and released, but their experience goes to show just how powerful the connections made at the GAMA Trade Show can be.

Danny Vigour Points to Alien Playing Piece on One of Chaosmos’s Ten Planets

Ares Games

Roberto Di Maglio briefly touched upon Ares Games’ past releases, Wings of Glory, Lord of Middle-earth, Aztlán, and Micro Monsters. The Italian native explained that Ares Games released World War I and World War II lines of pre-assembled and prepainted miniature planes “realistic enough for simulationists” for Wings of Glory in 2012. The game’s mechanic of a maneuver deck of cards to move the planes around has been a hit and Ares Games adapted the mechanic for their Age of Sail game, Sails of Glory. The first Kickstarter attempt for Ares Games, Sails of Glory is currently funded, but still open for backers. The game is set in the Napoleonic era. Kickstarter has also doubled the hits to Ares Games’ website, Di Maglio revealed.

Plastic Sci-Fi Miniatures from The Galaxy Defenders from Ares Games

Two other games Ares Games will be launching later this year are The Galaxy Defenders and Inkognito. The Galaxy Defenders is a cooperative game using sci-fi miniatures with the players taking the part of the Terrans and battling against the AI aliens. Di Maglio expects an August or September release for the game. Inkognito will remain close to the spirit of the classic game released by Milton Bradley in 1988.

The Stylized Playing Pieces of Inkognito Which Ares Games Will Release Later This Year

North Star Games: Clubs

Luke Warren from North Star Games kept his talk quite brief, focusing on the company’s newest release, Clubs. Clubs marks North Star Games’ entry into the light strategy market with the trick-taking game for 2-6 players, which takes 30 minutes to play. Retailing for only $14, it releases in April and may appear in Barnes & Noble stores. Expect a review of Clubs on Craven Games in the near future. Warren also noted that Wits and Wagers – Party will be replacing the regular version of Wits and Wagers in mass markets.

Cool Mini or Not

CMON Director Dave Doust

David Doust introduced himself as a director at Cool Mini or Not, then provided a little overview of CMON’s 11-year history, describing the CMON of the past as a place where he used to sell boutique miniatures and users would upload their own miniatures for rating. Now CMON has many partners and Doust referenced Rivet Wars as an example of the company’s success with Kickstarter and multiple brands, with CMON releasing 6-8 titles a year. Rivet Wars is also exclusively distributed by ACD, Doust noted. He then turned to another huge release, Zombicide, and pointed out that alpha gamer Kickstarter backers who receive the game tend to become salesmen for the game for retailers.

Cool Mini or Not in the Exhibitors’ Hall

CMON had a much more modest booth compared to their 2012 GTS booth or their sprawling 2012 Gen Con complex. The two glass display cases they brought though were packed with miniatures and they had a recognizable face backing up Sedition Wars in the form of Mike McVey.

Miniature Gaming and Painting Legend Mike McVey at the CMON GTS Booth

Some of the Zombicide miniatures on display were brand new, a CMON booth worker pointed out. He also showed the new mechanic whereby the survivors turn into zombies themselves by flipping over Amy’s character card, as well as the new survivor Derek, before slowly thumbing through the Toxic City Mall rulebook.

If there was a buzz word at the 2012 Gama Trade Show it was Kickstarter. Kickstarter this, Kickstarter that. It came up at almost every seminar I attended. At the wrap-up round table discussion on Friday at the GTS when an attendee questioned what Kickstarter was the room almost exploded with nerd incredulity. Fortunately someone was very brief in describing it and rival Indiegogo: instead of the artist or designer paying for a project, the fans are able to make contributions as a crowd, hence the term crowdfunding. In fancier terms, it’s a pledge aggregation site. As Anthony from the G.U.B.A.R. podcast said in G.U.B.A.R.’s 9th episode, “If you’re in the gaming community and you haven’t noticed Kickstarter, then you’re not paying attention.”

Dungeon Generator image copyright Paul Hughes.

Before the GAMA Trade Show though, I do have to admit to only having heard the name before and never had actually visited the Kickstarter website. The poster child for Kickstarter at the GTS was the reprint drive for Rich Burlew’s Order of the Stick which was brought up at least four times, as well as the fact that he raised $1.2 million with his campaign. In his Next Generation of RPGs, Jim Crocker introduced the idea of retailers using Kickstarter or Indiegogo to find new bleeding edge games for their customers, referencing the Kickstarter project for Random Dungeon Generator as a Dungeon Map, which raised $27,789, exceeding its $2,000 goal. Crowdfunding is a big deal. At Michael Stackpole’s Social Networking seminar, there was a rehash of what crowdfunding is and how it can benefit retailers. The idea of store owners talking to their players to find out their interests and ordering on their behalf was again brought up enthusiastically. Another possibility offered by crowdfunding is low-cost hardcopy advertisement in products, such as RPG rule books or expansions. Besides acknowledging individual contributors, a thanks or credits page could cite East Side Games for their assistance. Stackpole was also very modest in the brief crowdfunding discussion, not mentioning his own significant involvement in the launch of Wasteland 2 on Kickstarter ($2,933,252 raised with a goal of $900,000). Besides these various mentions of crowdfunding at the GAMA Trade Show, there was an entire unpublicized breakout session on the topic.

The Impromptu Crowdfunding Roundtable

One of the seminars I wandered into turned out to be quite different than what was posted on the sign; it was an impromptu Crowdfunding Roundtable with about two dozen GTS attendees. One of the factors in deciding between Kickstarter and Indiegogo that was being discussed was the need for a US bank for Kickstarter, whereas Indiegogo is more friendly for overseas crowdfunding. Another key difference is what happens with the funds if a project fails to fund. With Kickstarter, none of the contributors are charged, whereas the funds generated on Indiegogo are left to the developer’s discretion. Consequently an important part of developing on Indiegogo is deciding what you will do with the funds if you don’t meet your goal. They will also charge a higher percentage if your project doesn’t fund. Everyone who has conducted a Kickstarter campaign stressed that all of the prep work should be done first for the project and that developers should set realistic goals.

Retailer Scott Thorne shared his experience in using crowdfunding “years before Kickstarter or other forms of online crowdfunding became available.” The problem at his game store, Castle Perilous, was seating. Thorne solicited his customers for donations of $20 to help get new chairs for the store. He offered an inducement of putting each participant’s name on the back of an individual chair. The vanity reward paid off with 20 customers participating and securing the new seating for the store.

Others spoke on crowdsourcing. Vicky Beaver was asked to share her experience with Caladon Falls’s successful funding on Indiegogo and generally agreed with many of the other principles expressed about successful project management described here. Someone shared that less than 1% of project backers fail to make payment when it comes time to fund a successful Kickstarter project, which meshed with a project that was brought up which had secured $12,000 in funding, though one contribution of $5 didn’t come through.

The Hellas RPG Reprint has had 16 Updates

Jon Huston from Troll and Toad contributed that for him the updates are really important. Every Kickstarter that Huston has signed up for has fully funded, he said, including Wasteland 2. As a project moves along its developers can post updates to let fans know how far along from the goal they are, to encourage further advertising, and to keep fans abreast of any changes. The update posts to the Kickstarter project page, but also generates an email to backers. So far on the Hellas RPG reprint Kickstarter there have been 16 updates, with 11 of those before the project met its goal and 5 since then.

The Retail-Friendly Kickstarter Email List

David Wheeler of Dragon’s Lair Comics & Fantasy with stores in Austin, San Antonio, and a franchised store in Bellevue, WA attended the impromptu discussion. He has put together an email list of Kickstarter-friendly retailers, so if you are either developing a game project or are a retailer interested in this list, you can join it by emailing info at dlair.net. As of May 1, there were 47 interested retailers on the list.

Crowdfunding: Not for Everyone

Larry Roznai pointed out one perceived flaw with crowdfunding at the Domestic Manufacturing GTS seminar. Roznai argued that by offering games as rewards on Kickstarter, the manufacturer is bypassing retailers and in his experience, retailers are where manufacturers should be focusing their efforts. He’s not alone in urging caution when it comes to Kickstarter and Indiegogo. One attendee at the impromptu roundtable pointed out that it is deceptively easy to fail on Kickstarter. Failed Kickstarters aren’t advertised or promoted by Kickstarter and a project developer is unlikely to point out past failures. Since no money gets charged from contributors to failed projects, there are seldom any hard feelings, so a contributor is less likely to recall failed projects as well. However, in the exhibit hall later, a manufacturer mentioned that a friend intentionally launched a project, knowing it would fail, as a means of advertising a new product from his company. This is not what Kickstarter is all about and could have hurt the company’s reputation.

Kickstarter Veteran: Impact Miniatures

Tom Anders from Impact Miniatures has successfully funded 4 projects using Kickstarter, with the largest being a $5000 fund for a miniature ape football team. Anders had been approached about making a football team of great apes by a customer, but doubted that it would sell. Rather than dismiss the ape fan outright, Anders offered to put it on Kickstarter. The fan of football playing-primates rallied his friends and kicked in $2,000 of the project himself. The finished figures should be coming out in June. His minor inducements to contribute included a variety of figures, but Anders had two top tier stretch rewards. As Anders explains “stretch rewards are incentives that you offer the people after you’ve hit your goal.” In the case of the Ape Team, these included a customer getting an ape tattoo as one reward, with the other being a sixth sculpt for the primate team. The Apes of Wrath was selected by Kickstarter as a featured project, but only for a day. Anders did see a small spike in contributions while featured in the Top 3, but pointed out that he watches another game designer’s campaigns. When she would advertise being at a convention in her updates, there were much larger spikes in her funding on those convention days than what she got when her project was also featured in the Top 3. Anders agreed that “personal contact drives” Kickstarter.

As for the importance of updates, Anders says they are, “Vital. I have found that the Kickstarters that communicate on at least a bi-weekly basis seem to do much much better than the ones that just throw it out and don’t really let anyone know what’s going on. One of the things that Order of the Stick did so well was that every 2 days he sent out an update to thank everyone, to let them know what he was working on, to let them know what the next stretch reward would be.”

Impact Miniatures will be releasing their next project, Impact City Roller Derby, on Kickstarter with a projected date of May 15. When we talked at the GAMA Trade Show in March, Anders and his team had already come up with 5 different stretch rewards for the roller derby game. He also has already planned ahead to his promotion schedule for the future Kickstarter campaign, planning at least two convention events to help him sell it to potential backers. As for his track record with receiving the pledged funds, in Anders’s experience with the 4 projects, he has received 100% of the pledged funds which are charged through Amazon.com.

Further Kickstarter Advice: Collins Epic Wargames

A Kickstarted Tile Found in the Spearpoint ’43 Map Expansion

While at the GAMA Trade Show, besides interviewing Byron Collins about Collins Epic Wargaming’s upcoming 6mm sci-fi rules set Polyversal, I also asked him about Kickstarter and his experience with it. He pointed out that “it’s a great tool, but that’s what it is, a tool. It’s not the end all solution for you as a designer.” C.E.W. first used Kickstarter to fund the Spearpoint 1943 Map Expansion and he plans on crowdfunding again. The Spearpoint ’43 Map Expansion was a 60 day campaign and was a success, receiving over $10,000 for its goal of $7,500, or 135% funding. A key aspect of a successful Kickstarter plan according to Collins is taking the time to come up with excellent rewards for your backers. One prestige level of reward Collins offered was the chance to appear as a character in the game’s stories authored by Mark Walker that will accompany the map expansion. Another tier of rewards was unlocked when the Spearpoint expansion reached $10,000, allowing Collins to include more bonus map tiles, as a stretch reward. Despite the success, Collins has noted areas where he could improve in future campaigns and is willing to share his experience with others designers. As for general advice to game developers on doing their first Kickstarter, Collins suggests:

“If you’re about to launch a Kickstarter campaign and nobody knows who you are, you’re on the wrong path. You need to already be out there, on BoardGameGeek maybe, or at a show doing a demo, not necessarily doing a booth, but go play at open gaming at a convention, get a lot of good feedback on that game, test it really well, make sure it’s done, because a lot of games up there, it’s obvious that they’re not fully developed, they’re not fully hashed out.”

Besides Kickstarters going well, Collins pointed out that they can also fail miserably. It is this binary finite nature of Kickstarter, success or failure, that Collins also seems to enjoy. Either fans want it or they do not. He did have this advice to offer though:

One of the things that I see happening is people who have never dealt with game production before, get into Kickstarter, they raise a ton of money, and all of a sudden, you’re on the hook. You’re on the hook with people’s money and that’s a big deal. If you’re not a business, and you launch a Kickstarter, you’ve got some tax implications. Really, either way. You’ve got to think about a lot of those things. You got to think about how you’re going to use that funding. Do you already have production sources? Do you have a good idea of what your goal really should be? Are you spending money on advertising? What’s going to come out of that funded Kickstarter? Is it going to be depleted immediately by ad money that you’ve spent on BoardGameGeek. I mean, that may be well spent to help it work, but if you’ve spent all your production money from Kickstarter, you’re going to be in debt, really, because you’re on the hook. So when you get on the hook like that, make sure you know what you’re doing. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you don’t have any sources, there’s people in the industry, including myself, that are willing to help because we don’t want to see people making mistakes that take a great idea and end up not making it happen, because I’m a gamer myself. I like to see new great games, I’ve backed a bunch on Kickstarter myself and the good games out there, you can tell the ones that are done well, and you can tell the ones that aren’t quite ready for Kickstarter, so there’s a lot of prep, and there’s a lot of engagement you have to maintain with people who are watching your project.

First Kickstarter from GTS Attendee: Disaster Looms

I attended several panels and ate with Eric Salyers at the GAMA Trade Show. Also new to the GTS and game manufacturing, he brought his space exploration game Disaster Looms! with him. The game is a boardless board game, using hexagonal playing tiles instead, which I thumbed through at the show. His company Break From Reality games has just launched its Disaster Looms! Kickstarter campaign with a goal of raising $25,000. His team at Break From Reality Games is getting the word out via Facebook ads and updates, BoardGameGeek ads and updates, in-store demos, and Kickstarter itself.

Disaster Looms! is offering at least two tiers of retailer-only awards, because, in Salyers’s words, “game stores are the back-bone of our industry” as well as being “the nexus of our community.” Several of Disaster Looms! rewards include in-store game promotion from the Break From Reality team. As he sees it, “I am in this for the long-haul, and plan to release other game titles, and expansions – I need to have an alliance with the game store owner as early as possible.”

Salyers is no stranger to Kickstarter having funded 18 projects so far. He points to The Present as both the first Kickstarter he helped fund and as an inspiration for him as a creator. Salyers actually created Disaster Looms! the night he watched The Present. He also has funded several TMG titles due to his love of “great game play and creatives themes.”

As for stretch rewards, Salyers and his team at Break From Reality have given it a lot of thought:

Our team had rewards chosen all the way to $125,000 funding level. We have released the $32,500 level, and the $40,000 level. We have hinted that there is a $55k+ level as well. We are sitting at 23% funded after 3 days … and we know of a couple thousand in commitments to come. So we are feeling happy, though still stressed about whether we will make our goal. And in particular – we really want to hit the $40,000 level of funding so we can release the game as a 2-6 player game. We really wanted to do this from the outset, but it too high of a goal to start off with for an unknown company with an unknown IP [Intellectual Property]. Stretch goals to us are all about rewarding backers, and creating rewards that will be really appreciated by our backers. We spent literally weeks on the design, testing, and validation of what we wanted as stretch goals. It would not be good enough to throw in branded items that would be of no value or real relation to the game play experience. We think the first player token will enhance the play value of the game, and make the bidding process for the token a little more worthwhile each turn. A heavy sculpted coin is fun to fiddle with. Everyone knows it. The 5-6 player expansion, a true expansion mind you, will add not just 2 more players – but more game content. It will add additional replay-ability to the 2-4 player game as well!

The Disaster Looms! Kickstarter will end its run on June 18. According to Salyers, the Kickstarter process is “a very straight forward system” and he’s had no problems or confusion along the way. Like Byron Collins, Salyers also enjoys the finality of the Kickstarter approach: “you have created something, and now you are sending it out to the world to be accepted or denied.”

This “do or die” feature of crowdfunding is also one of its great strengths and one of the reasons the game industry has begun shifting. Instead of conducting market research or trusting a gut instinct or experience when it comes to whether a game will sell or not, even established companies can vet new products and projects on Kickstarter or Indiegogo and actually know whether they might have a winner on their hands. While there are a few complications and problems to this approach of game marketing, overall the effect on the industry should be a great one.

Disaster Looms! box art is copyright Break From Reality, Hellas cover is copyright Khepera Publishing, and the Spearpoint 1943 Bunker Tile is copyright Collins Epic Wargaming, all used with permission.